of biscuits lay untouched.
The Global Non-governmental Threat Response Committee (popularly reduced to ‘the G&T’) was formed in October 2002 to respond to extraordinary threats to global security and the fabric of Western civilisation. It had fourteen expert members and a decision-making core of five including Commander King as its chairman. They had only been forced to meet three times over the last decade2, and they knew whatever they were here for it would be serious.
Deadly serious.
A technician reported: “Ready when you are, sir.”
“Good. Seal the room,” said Commander King.
He waited as doors were locked and blinds whirred down.
“Now… You may be wondering why you’ve been called here.”
His voice was deep and used to command – controlled, no-nonsense and yet also theatrical.
“Well. One of our scientists is missing. And it seems he has released – this…”
The technician hit a key and up on the screen, in enormous scale, appeared an image…
DAY ONE 07:41 (BST). Willard’s Copse, Berkshire, UK
Kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill…
“Lamp trap?” snapped Al.
“Check,” said Finn.
“Nets?”
“Check.”
“Traps?”
“Check.”
“Pins?”
“Check.”
“Jars?”
Yap!
“Idiot dog.”
They were back at Grandma’s rambling old house now, going through the gear Finn had got together for their trip.
“Ethyl acetate?”
“‘The Agent of Death?’” mugged Finn. “Check.”
“Cards and fixing spray?”
“Check! It’s all here, let’s go!”
Yap! agreed Yo-yo (particularly delighted as ‘go’ meant ‘run about outside with Yo-yo’), leaping at Finn with such excitement that he knocked a shoebox full of plastic soldiers off a shelf and sent the lot skittering across the garage floor.
“Oh great,” Finn said, having to pick them up one by one.
“There should be some fishing rods back here…” said Al, wading through a decade’s worth of accumulated junk at the back of the garage.
Finn had been on a similar junk hunt on his first summer at Grandma’s, which was how he’d discovered Al’s boyhood bug-collecting gear behind a defunct Mini. He and Al had set up the lamp trap, a glowing, tent-like apparatus, in the back garden, and stayed up half the night collecting and cataloguing the multitude of insects drawn towards the light.
Grandma hadn’t seen it as a proper way to mourn the passing of a mother, a sister, a daughter. But then they were male, and men were different when it came to emotions, especially powerful emotions, and if arranging dead insects helped them to cope then so be it. She also knew her daughter, wherever she was, would be looking down in approval at the two of them forming such an odd, unbreakable bond.
The second of Mum’s Big Three Rules for Finn was: “Be yourself.” Finn had never really figured out what that meant, but he’d ended up with 108 different species of native insects in various states of disrepair mounted on two A3 cards above the fireplace in his room.
Bombus lucorum, Bombus terrestris, Bombus lapidarius (bumblebees that sounded so good it made your mouth go funny); leafcutter, miner and carpenter bees; churchyard, mealworm and common oil beetles; big stags, small stags; seven-spot and eyed ladybirds; sawfly (you should see their wings), blowfly, housefly, horn fly; fantastic, impossible dragonflies and damsels (some in distress); moths upon moths – almost every type of hawk; and butterflies fit for an art gallery – tortoiseshell and fritillary, red admiral and Camberwell beauty, swallowtail and green-veined whites.
The writing on the labels was childish and some of the pins and mounts had been knocked off, but the samples themselves still looked fantastic. He knew everything about them; he’d read every book and article. He could recite all their names and characteristics.
Finn wondered if his interest was just natural or whether he was trying to force a connection back to his parents, both of whom had been scientists (he’d lost his father, Ethan, in a laboratory accident just after he was born, his mother more recently to cancer). Either way it felt right. And when Al asked him what he’d like to do on his ‘week off’ from Grandma, Finn immediately knew he wanted to add to the collection.
“Great idea. How about the blind insects of the Pyrenees?” said Al. “Freakish, eyeless Ungeheuer found in the deepest mountain caverns, evolved over twenty million years of total darkness!”
“The Pyrenees?”
“It’s a mountain range between France and Spain.”
“I know where it is, but Grandma…”
“Never tell Grandma anything; it only worries her and then you can’t shut her up.”
Before Finn knew it, the trip was on.
“Let’s hit the road,” said Al, reappearing from the back of the garage with two fishing rods and a jar of old tobacco pipes. “We’ve got to get to the ferry by three.”
Finn snapped his fingers and Yo-yo sprang into the tiny back of the Mangusta, delighted because everything delighted Yo-yo. Bathtime. Being locked outside in the rain. Being shouted at. And right now – being taken to certain incarceration in kennels.
En route, Al called the secretary at Finn’s school, Mrs Jennings, claiming, with a completely straight face, to be consultant dermatologist “Dr Xaphod Schmitten, that’s X-A-P-H—”, and that he was rushing Infinity Drake to his private clinic because of “an acute case of seborrhoeic dermatitis”.
“It is absolutely vital to initiate wire-brushing.” If everything went well, the boy would be discharged in a week, Al continued, though he might be totally bald, and if so what was the school policy on “the wearing of a headscarf and/or wig for medical reasons”? The secretary, alarmed, put him on hold to consult a higher authority, then came back on the line to ask if she could just take his name again. “Of course,” said Al, “Herr Doktor Xaphod Schmitten, that’s X-A-P—” and then pretended to be
