Famine

Famine

 

First published in 1967

© John Creasey Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1967-2013

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

 

The right of John Creasey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

 

This edition published in 2013 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

 

Typeset by House of Stratus.

 

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

 

 

This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author's imagination.

Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

 

www.houseofstratus.com

 

 

 

John Creasey – Master Storyteller - was born in Surrey, England in 1908 into a poor family in which there were nine children, John Creasey grew up to be a true master story teller and international sensation. His more than 600 crime, mystery and thriller titles have now sold 80 million copies in 25 languages. These include many popular series such as
Gideon of Scotland Yard, The Toff, Dr Palfrey and The Baron
.

Creasey wrote under many pseudonyms, explaining that booksellers had complained he totally dominated the 'C' section in stores. They included:

 

Gordon Ashe, M E Cooke, Norman Deane, Robert Caine Frazer, Patrick Gill, Michael Halliday, Charles Hogarth, Brian Hope, Colin Hughes, Kyle Hunt, Abel Mann, Peter Manton, J J Marric, Richard Martin, Rodney Mattheson, Anthony Morton and Jeremy York.

 

Never one to sit still, Creasey had a strong social conscience, and stood for Parliament several times, along with founding the
One Party Alliance
which promoted the idea of government by a coalition of the best minds from across the political spectrum.

He also founded the
British Crime Writers' Association
, which to this day celebrates outstanding crime writing.
The Mystery Writers of America
bestowed upon him the
Edgar Award
for best novel and then in 1969 the ultimate
Grand Master Award
. John Creasey's stories are as compelling today as ever.

 

The main task of a writer of thrillers is to entertain rather than to instruct. Such instruction as occurs is usually incidental – properly vague in such subjects as breaking into safes, though sometimes usefully detailed in respect of antidotes to poisons or methods of immobilising cars. Nevertheless, any effective form of literature is extremely good at conveying and popularising new ideas. It is most encouraging to me as a scientist to see the excellent piece of entertainment which Mr. Creasey has written around a most important idea derived from his interest in the Family Planning Movement.

This idea, that a steadily multiplying population must eventually out run its resources, however large these may be, is obvious enough to the mathematician who deals in exponentials but is evidently not yet clear to those who hope to deal with human expansion by food production alone. Although there are doubtless details at which a pedant might cavil, the book is good science fiction in that the Lozi do not break any major scientific laws – and are not biologically nearly so difficult to accept as the giants in that recognised classic, H. G. Wells'
Food for the Gods.

 

J. H. Fremlin

Professor of Applied Radioactivity,

The University of Birmingham, England

 

The problem of the starving millions has been stated, overstated and understated over many years. “The next 24 to 28 years are going to be the most critical”, Dr. Binay Sen, director-general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, said in New York last night. He gave this warning: “If the rate of food production cannot be significantly increased, we must be prepared for the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.” It is against this background that the Indicative World Plan for Agricultural Development is now being prepared by the F.A.O., of which
The Times
is today able to publish exclusively a summary of the first progress report.

From
The Times,
Wednesday, 19th October, 1966.

 

 

Neil Anderson was not a particularly big man, nor especially tall, although, as he walked along the English country lane, his physical strength and fitness were apparent. The woman sitting in the driving-seat of the old Hillman station wagon, parked beneath the shade of a big oak tree, saw this with approval. As he drew near, she noticed that he was good-looking, too, and she wondered why he was walking, where he was going and whether he would stop to pass the time of day. Across the field of wind- and storm-flattened barley, her husband had been working with a combine-harvester machine. Now it was nearly six o'clock, and she had come to pick him up.

The man drew nearer, and smiled. She smiled back at him, with a warmth which was natural to her.

Anderson stopped by the open car window.

She saw that he was preoccupied. Saw too that there was anxiety, perhaps even fear, in his glance as he looked about him.

“Forgive me for asking, but have you been here long?” She noticed that his voice held a slightly foreign inflection.

“Ten minutes or so,” she answered, softening the bluntness of the words by adding: “I'm waiting for my husband.”

“I see. Have you seen anything unusual?”

She liked the way he spoke as well as the way he looked, yet she was sure that he was a man afraid. Her husband regarded her as the most matter-of-fact person he knew, and indeed she was, but owned qualities of understanding and insight not always recognised.

“No. Everything is normal,” she answered.

He insisted. “In the field, perhaps? Or beneath the tree when you pulled under it?”

“All I've seen are two rabbits, some sparrows, a pair of crows and a cock pheasant,” she answered reassuringly. “They're not very unusual.”

His eyes were very still, questioning.

“Rabbits?” he repeated sharply.

“Two.” She pointed along the road towards the five-barred gate. “They bobbed out of the grass and back again, just after I came. Have you a rabbit-pie in mind?”

“No.” His voice sounded impatient.
“How
many rabbits, did you say?”

Why was he so interested in the rabbits?

“Two.”

“Could you show me exactly where you saw them?”

Why on earth was a foreigner walking along a country lane so interested in rabbits? For their skins? She resisted the temptation to ask him, and pointed towards the five-barred gate through which her husband, David, had taken his chattering machine. The gate was closed; whether cattle were in a field or not, he always closed the gate.

“Along there,” said Betty Fordham.

Solemnly, the man said “Thank you”, and raised his hat. Puzzled and curious, yet sympathetic towards him, she watched him approach the gate. The only sounds were the trilling of birds, the whispering of wind over the corn, the clanking of the combine-harvester machine. Suddenly Betty realised the stealth of the stranger's footsteps; as he drew nearer the gate, he appeared to be crouching, peering cautiously ahead – almost as if he were afraid of what he might see.

“What on earth's the matter with him?” Betty asked herself, uneasiness, even suspicion, springing to mind. Could he have escaped from a home?

Recollection of his direct glance, and the utter lack of personal interest she read in it, sobered her. Nevertheless his behaviour had not, from the first, been entirely normal. He was bending down with elaborate caution, scanning the ground near the gate, the rain-washed grass starred with the hoof marks of cattle, flattened with tyre tracks under feathery wisps of hay. No detective could have inspected the ground more closely.

Detective?
Could that be …

Suddenly he started back so suddenly that the violence of the movement shocked her. He almost fell. At the same moment, a rabbit
leapt
at him. The attack had all the desperation of a hunger-driven rat in its raw ferocity, as the animal leapt straight at his throat.

Betty Fordham sat frozen to the car seat.

The man flung up his arms to defend himself, tore wildly at the rabbit, caught it and hurled it away. The small body went flying over the gate. The man staggered backwards, patches of bright red streaking his hands. Recovering his balance, he stood motionless, staring down, as if expecting the rabbit to return to the attack.

It was fantastic! A rabbit …

Suddenly the man swung round and ran towards Betty, and as he did so she saw three things at the same instant – several more rabbits, bounding towards him, blood on his hands and neck, and terror in his eyes. All at once she realised that he was trying desperately to reach her before the rabbits caught up with him, that he saw the car as sanctuary. Now almost as intensely involved as he, she leaned forward and flung the door open a split second before the man reached it. Three rabbits were close behind him, one made a fierce bound, and bit at his ankle. He kicked it off, and scrambled into the car, slamming the door.

She heard a squeak, as of pain.

“Windows!” he gasped. “Windows!
Keep them out.”

Her window was wide open, and she saw two rabbits –
rabbits! – 
spring towards it. Seized by his fear, she snatched at the handle and wound it desperately, hearing scratching sounds at the door. In the back, the man sat gasping and shivering, slowly bleeding. Betty twisted round in her seat, and saw the ugliness of the gashes in his throat, and on the backs of his hands.

“Telephone,” he muttered. “Must reach a telephone.”

The nearest was at the Goose Inn, at the cross-roads a mile along the lane.

“Telephone. Please hurry.”

He was pressing against the wound in his neck in an endeavour to staunch the flow of blood. His eyes were staring. Again a fleeting, fearful thought crossed her mind: That he was mad. Even as she thought this, she was switching on the ignition and pulling the self-starter. Mad or not, he needed a doctor. She mustn't lose a moment getting to the telephone. She started off, doing everything quickly and with the good driver's expertise, although she was still so horrified that she had not said a word. Staring ahead through the windscreen, she saw no rabbits.

They had been rabbits, and yet there had been something different about their appearance as well as about their behaviour. She carried the picture of what she had witnessed in her mind like a scene from a film, a confused medley of feverish movement and activity, of scratching paws, of lips drawn back . . .

Lips! Rabbits didn't have lips like human beings, but these had. Or was it an hallucination? Had she really seen lips and faces which were more like tiny human faces than the faces of rabbits?

The man began to speak in a slow measured voice: “Tell the police they must inform Dr. Palfrey. Please understand. Dr. Palfrey. Say I did not know they were deadly – but I saw one kill a dog. After that I was afraid. You must understand. Dr.
 Palfrey.
Please say that name.”

She did not turn round, but repeated: “Dr. Palfrey. P-A-L-F-R-E-Y.”

“Good,” he said, and seemed to sigh.

Betty could not think clearly, and the speed at which she drove blurred vision of the leafy hawthorn hedge on either side, fields, sharp-speared grass, birds, even the sky and the far-off hills. The car was hurtling along, and suddenly she realised that she was panic-stricken; this furious speed was a measure of the fear this man, and the incident, had put into her.

She slowed down as the road surface improved, until at last the Goose Inn showed up above the hedge, angled against the sky, slates and grey stone dark even in the sun which glinted on the windows and was absorbed by the roofs of two long sheds. No cars were outside. The telephone poles, stretching across the countryside like matchsticks strung together with cotton and stuck in bright green plasticine, made her think of the man in the back of her car, and the husky way he had muttered:
“Telephone. Telephone.”
She turned her head.

“Oh, no!” she gasped.

He was slumped back in a corner, hands loosened as those of a doll, mouth slack, eyes staring. After the first shock, she knew the truth. The man was dead. Blood glistened bright red, on his neck. She drove on mechanically, drawing nearer the ugly, solitary inn. She put her hand on the horn, and the harsh stridency of its note slashed the silence. No one stirred.

She got out of the car slowly, braced herself, and opened the back door, stretching out her hand to feel the other's pulse, yet quite sure there would be no movement.

A man appeared at the side door of the Goose Inn – Jacob Gosling, the fifth in his line to own the inn, which had been named by his great, great grandfather. He was short, dark, saturnine, a man whom no one liked yet whom no one had cause to dislike.

“What is it?” he called in his hard voice.

“Come here, Jake. Hurry!” she pleaded.

He came with his slow, deliberate, countryman's movement. She drew back from the man whose pulse did not beat; he had died as a stuck pig might die, and yet – had there been so much bleeding? Drawing away, she saw reddish-brown marks on the lower part of the window, and realised that they were figures; numbers.

Telephone …

Jake's footsteps grated on the loose gravel, as he reached her side.

“What's the matter, Betty?” He peered into the car, and his tone and manner changed abruptly. “My God, what's happened?”

Rabbits
had attacked the man. It was unbelievable.

“I—I don't know. He was by the big oak. He—he wanted to telephone.” Betty Fordham paused between each word, finding them difficult to utter. “Do you see—that number?” She pointed.

Jake stared, hooded eyes wide open, trap of a mouth, for once uncertain.

“That's S1234X,” he said. “Ess, one, two, three, four, ex.
Ess.”

“Salisbury?”

“Southampton?”

“Is it a London number?”

“Or Shaftesbury?”

“Jake.” Betty said urgently. “I've been scared out of my wits. Have you—have you ever seen a ferret attack a rabbit?”

“What a daft question. A thousand times.”

“A
rabbit
attacked this man.”

Jacob Gosling's eyelids dropped over the questioning brightness of his grey eyes, his mouth became a trap again. He did not comment, but she knew that what she said had been registered as the raving of a hysterical woman.
Was
it? If the body of the man had not been in the car, she might have thought that something had indeed turned her mind. But the body was irrefutably there. Acutely conscious of Jacob's scepticism, she said nervously: “Will you try these numbers?”

“I ought to call a doctor—and the police. The police,” Jacob Gosling repeated, as if that were a new and important idea. “It's a matter for the police. You know that, surely.”

“It would be half-an-hour before anyone got here!”

“They could telephone this number,” Jacob remarked, and she could tell by the set of his mouth and chin that his mind was made up. “We'll leave the man in the car. I'll not touch him until the police arrive.” Nothing would shift him from that decision now that it was made, but he knew only what she had told him. He took her arm and led her towards the Goose Inn, firm, determined, almost kindly. The late afternoon sun was warm. In an hour the first customers would come to the inn.

“Jake, listen to me.”

“I'll listen while I'm on the telephone.”

“Jake, rabbits did attack him.”

“Yes, yes, you “told me,” he said, too easily, too soothingly.

“Jake, never mind what you believe. Tell the police to send for a Dr. Palfrey. And—and tell them that rabbits with men's faces killed this stranger. Jake,
please.”

They were in a dark, narrow passage, with an open door at the far end, and a telephone fastened by a bracket to the wall.

“I'll tell them,” he promised. “What name did you say?”

“Palfrey. Dr. Palfrey.”

“Right then. Now you go and sit down.” One door led to the saloon bar, comfortable with red-leather upholstered chairs and glass-topped tables, brass beer handles bright as polished gold, bottles glistening behind the bar. “Help yourself to what you fancy,” he invited.

She did not feel like drinking. There was something on her mind, a forgotten thing, teasing, harassing. She dropped into a chair as Jake stood, with his back to her, dialling. What had she forgotten?

Jake said: “It's Jacob Gosling of the Goose Inn speaking … Is the inspector there … Yes, he'll do … sergeant, this is Gosling of the Goose Inn … I have to report a crime … Well, a death … A Mrs. Fordham, wife of a farmer who … Betty Fordham, yes … She has just come in with a dead man in the back of her car … Yes, sergeant, I said a dead man … She states a rabbit attacked him … Yes, I did say rabbit … I'm only telling you what she told me, I'm not an eye witness … He asked for a telephone before he died, and wrote a number on the window of the car … in blood. And he wants a Dr. Palfrey to be informed. Palfrey.” All this time, Jacob's voice had been pitched at the same level, and even the words ‘In blood' came out matter-of-factly. It held the monotony of a gramophone record. “The first letter was S—yes, ess … then one, two, three, four, ex—”

He broke off. From his attitude, the very movement of his broad shoulders and solid figure, the woman knew he had received a shock. When he spoke again, his voice was pitched on a higher key.

“That's right, ess, one, two, three, four, ex written in blood … Yes … She was by herself, as far as I know … Yes, the big oak tree in Duck Lane … on the way to Fordham's Farm …”

Dave! Dave was in that field. That was what she had forgotten – her husband.

Betty sprang up from the chair, a vivid mental picture of the leaping ‘rabbits' with their sharp teeth and their fury, flashed before her as she realised that Dave might be attacked. At all costs he must be warned. She ran into the passage as Jacob said: “Yes, I'll wait for you. Don't be too long.”