Too Cold For Snow

victim. Krink’s fingers tensed at the thought…
    Krink noticed a tiny flash of light in the street, tell tale sunlight refracted off the curve of a camera lens. Special Branch must be snapping him from the van. He had been followed once or twice that month – all the result of a computer glitch which had put him on the sex offenders’ register – but he saw it as a training exercise and no matter how many times they found where he was he could always, always give them the slip, as if he had the mantle of invisibility to drape over his shoulders. He’d hacked into the police mainframe to find out why he was under surveillance and knew he could delete all knowledge of himself if he so desired. They’d taken so many photographs of him that he felt like a male model, despite his pipe-cleaner frame and bulbous eyes with their bags of tiredness underneath and the thinness of his blonde wisps of hair. All in all it was a face with a lived-in look – a squat for a hell of a lot of hard-partying people. Most prominent of all was the teeth, the jagged feature that made him look half shark, half graveyard, a distinctive mix of tombstone molars and ferocious incisors. He borrowed some guy’s red kagoule and slipped out the back door.
    As he left town he checked in the rear view mirror and the unmarked car was still stationery. Krink thought, how on earth did they ever catch anyone?
    The car gears squealed as he went up the one- in-nine gradient that took him past Twyn-y-Rhodyn farm. He cut through Dol Padog plantations and slalomed the car along the forestry roads until he’d gained a thousand feet and the ozone in the subalpine air made his head spin. He parked on a mossy verge at the base of the track that criss-crossed a huge expanse of bracken and headed for the snake traps.
    There were forty wide-mouthed Kilner jars buried on the hillside and Krink knew he could expect to find a snake alive in at least three of them. He took out his thick gloves and a cleft hazel stick, along with a small gamekeeper’s bag filled with phials and other kit and strode out into waist-high ferns. April was a good time as the snakes were still torpid after their winter’s sleep. Not that they wouldn’t be angry about spending a night or three in a glass prison.
    The first three were full of bric-a-brac: dried fern fronds, a beetle struggling on its back, and sheep droppings. The fourth held a fear-crazed shrew that was trying to somersault its way out of the glass mouth. Krink released it and it caught its tiny breath before racing away, a mad clockwork toy heading for the hedge.
    The last jar on the ridge held a fine specimen of male reptile, its colour scheme designed to shock, a waspish black and yellow-white zigzagging right the way along a meaty back down to its pin-tail. Its pipe body coiled and recoiled, restless, agitated. The walls of the jar were sufficiently curved to deny the snake any chance of escape as Krink pinioned its head between the tines of the stick. Keeping the snake in place he turned the jar, juggling it slowly so that the head was near the opening and he could do his work. The muscled body bucked and twisted but Krink kept a firm grip. He milked the venom straight into the phial as the creature’s eyes stared at him and the fangs, hypodermically, dripped their stunning fluids. Then, with the head sequestered in his fist, Krink lifted out the snake and placed it on a grassy tump from where it slithered away after a few seconds of gaining composure. There were two more snakes to harvest: one a curiosity as its venom was tinged with purple, a hint of whinberries. Krink set the seal on the glass container. He labelled it Brynberllan 3. He liked to know the provenance of his bullets.
     
    On a housing estate fifty miles away a group of women were meeting to talk about things of major import.
    The eldest among them, Margot, without a silent ‘t’, dished out some cigarettes, ultra-cheap ones which gave her a rasping cough. The cigarettes she smoked were so cheap they didn’t even include tobacco, the nicotine sprayed on.
    They were meeting at the community centre, although community had to be used in an ironic sense. They all lived in a sink estate where society had pulled the plug years ago. It was nowadays divided into sections, like Berlin after the war. There were the prefabs, left over from the last war and full of damp, next to the fifties houses with walls as thin as tissue. Then there was Debtor’s