Deathwatch Read Free

the pavements. A tall, thin woman, wearing a leather jacket, hurried towards a parked motorbike, climbed on it and sped round the corner with a practised roar. There was a young man, thickly coated, scruffy, a woollen hat pulled down over his straggly hair, his collar up, walking quickly away. Was it him? And even if it was, had he been following her?
    No, silly idea, she thought. There’s no way he was following me. It’s just the darkness playing tricks. He would have had the same desire to get to the road as she’d had. Nothing to be suspicious about.
    A cyclist, wearing a coat and hood but no helmet, came suddenly from behind the old police phone box a few metres ahead. He set off in the same direction as she was going, disappearing into the distance.
    A few minutes later, Cat was in her small street. A loud motorbike went past the end of the street, briefly shattering the peace, but the noise quickly faded.
    She turned her key in the lock. The familiar warmth and smells drew her in and she pulled the door shut behind her. A cyclist could be heard passing as she did so. A shiver ran down her neck before she closed the door firmly, and put from her mind all thoughts of her earlier fear.
    Cat McPherson was safe.

CHAPTER 4
AN INSECT-LOVER
    THE following day, an innocent September Wednesday. In the flickering unnatural twilight of the insect room of the National Museum of Scotland, a hand gently strokes the glass above the rows of beetles:
Coleoptera
. Beneath his fingers are legs, many legs. Thin, jointed, some of them long, some hunched as if ready to pounce.
    Cerambycidae
: long-horned beetles, with impossibly long antennae. Here, small and unobtrusive, is
Xestobium rufovillosum
: the deathwatch beetle. Some people say that it warns of approaching death. He hovers his hand above it, closes his eyes a little, tries to imagine. They are silly people who say this: it’s a myth. The real reason for its name, he knows, is that this wood-boring beetle is often heard tapping in the floorboards and walls during the quietness around death, as people wait and watch in unusual silence.
    Mind you, insects are clever enough: they
could
know when death was approaching. He wonders what it would feel like to know.
    As he moves to the next cabinet, there is a commotion. Through the door at the far end come some schoolkids with their teacher. Their silly, high-pitched voices grate, the girls squealing at an enormous model of a beetle. He clenches his teeth.
    He must do what he has come to do. Replace the light bulbs in all cabinets where there is the sign: “Lighting failure reported by Visitor Services.”
    He doesn’t need light. He’s spent a lot of time here and could reel off the names easily. These are dragonflies, in serried ranks like army tanks or Chinese soldiers. Odonata Anisoptera.
    Taking a special key from his toolbag, he opens the glass lid of the cabinet. He cannot stop a small smile, which seems to start from the pit of his stomach. It’s a melting feeling, a softening as edges blur. When he has a cup of tea, he always holds the sugar-lump on the surface of the liquid and watches the tea rise into the sugar and dissolve it out of his fingers – this feeling is like that.
    He needs to touch. And slowly, gently, hesitantly, he stretches his fingers towards his beautiful dragonflies.
    He strokes them so softly that their dead gossamer wings barely shiver. With his eyes closed, he focuses all his senses into the surface of his fingers, feeling the invisible film of the insect fibres, his skin almost hearing rather than touching, the sensation as soft as breath.
    Now he opens his eyes. It’s a poor display, he often thinks. Just the names, no information, and so much unsaid. So much more he knows. You can not tell from his brown coat, or from the fact that his task seems merely to be to change light bulbs, but he has been a professor of entomology – insects, to the rest of us. It has been his passion and life’s