Already Dead(89)

‘No, sir.’

Hicklin peered at him closely, and seemed to come to a decision.

‘Come in out of the rain.’

‘Thank you.’

Cooper shook some of the rain off his waxed coat on to the flags in the hallway. ‘It doesn’t look as though it’s going to stop,’ he said.

‘Not likely.’ Hicklin laughed wheezily. ‘I’d like to think it’s the Great Flood. You know … the Deluge.’

Cooper could hear the capital letters, and guessed Mr Hicklin was referring to the Old Testament story of Noah and his ark. The rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights. It wasn’t far off the mark this summer.

‘You would, sir?’

‘Well, the world needs a good clean-out, don’t you think?’ said Hicklin. ‘We’ve turned it into a global cesspit over the centuries. It’s time that Mother Nature washed it all away and started again. Surely you must agree?’

‘No comment,’ said Cooper. Even as he said it, he reflected that he must have sat in on too many suspect interviews. ‘No comment, no comment’ – he’d heard it so often it had become a mantra, a line he couldn’t get out of his head, like the chorus of a cheesy pop song. It was a phrase that solicitors trained their clients to repeat ad nauseam, in order to avoid committing themselves.

So why had he evaded an answer to Hicklin’s question? Did the world need a good clean-out? Maybe. But not in this way.

He followed Hicklin through the hallway into a small sitting room. The grubby curtains were matched by the damp wallpaper and a few feet of grimy, rubbish-strewn carpet. The old man offered him one of the two armchairs in the room, and settled himself down in the other. Once he was inside the house, Cooper soon became aware of a steady drip, drip, drip. Not a regular pattern, but an irregular sound like a piece of avant-garde music, imaginatively played on plastic bucket and steel saucepan.

‘Aye, the Deluge. Quite a lot of us think that we’re living in depraved and degenerate times,’ said Hicklin with an enigmatic smile. ‘I’ve been waiting decades for a nice, deadly disease to wipe out a large part of the earth’s population. That’s the only answer to the situation the human race has got itself into. It’s the natural solution, the way that Mother Nature deals with chronic overcrowding in the population of any other species. I’m certain it will happen one day.’

Cooper just nodded in acknowledgement, recognising that he was obliged to listen to Hicklin riding this hobby horse if he was to get the chance to ask him any questions. Some people didn’t get many visitors. They stored up things like this, went over and over them in their own minds, and needed to let off steam when they got the opportunity. Cooper guessed he must be the first visitor to this cottage in days, perhaps weeks.

‘What will happen one day?’ he said.

‘Ah, well. These floods and hurricanes and earthquakes are all very well, but disasters are a drop in the ocean. The only thing that can do the job is an outbreak of a new flu strain, like the one back in 1918 that killed five per cent of the world’s population. Do you know it caused more deaths than the Great War did in five years of slaughter? With the enormous increase in air travel and the expansion of global trade, pandemics spread even more quickly now. One of those every month for a while would sort things out nicely.’

‘Oh, nicely,’ said Cooper.

He found it difficult to tell from Mr Hicklin’s enigmatic little smile how far he was joking, and what exactly he was serious about. A lot of Derbyshire people were like that. They could tell you anything with a straight face, and then think you were simple for believing a single word they said.

‘People are always predicting the end of the world. The Apocalypse, the Rapture, the last day of the Mayan calendar. But it never happens, more’s the pity. We live in a strange world. And people are the strangest things in it.’

‘You won’t hear me arguing with that, sir.’

‘So I suppose that’s why we have all these hippies about here,’ said Hicklin.

‘Hippies?’

‘Students, ramblers, campers, motorcyclists. You know.’

Cooper nodded. He’d heard it said, or read it somewhere. As far as some of these old farmers and quarrymen were concerned, a hippy was anyone not wearing a tweed cap and wellies.

As he sat in Hicklin’s armchair, Cooper began to notice that the sounds around him were changing, their pitch rising and becoming more liquid as the buckets gradually filled with water. Drip, drip … ping.

Hicklin noticed his attention straying.

‘Lead,’ he said. ‘You just can’t get it these days. Or at least, not without nicking it off someone’s roof.’