'Keith!' Kirsten was on the verge of panic. He gripped her wrist hard, was not taking any chances on her opening the door and trying to make a run for it. He recalled his own flight three days ago. He had only made it to the garage by the grace of God. Kirsten certainly would not make it back to the road.

'Don't worry.' He tried to sound convincing. 'She'll go in a minute.' But he knew it wouldn't because it had been reluctant to start even on these hot summer mornings. It was the battery, sure enough, possibly the same one that was on this S-registered vehicle from new, now old and tired. Dying, maybe dead already. There was just a faint chance that if they waited a few minutes it might fire. A very faint chance, the kind you only relied on when there was nothing else left. The snake was on the bonnet now, coils of it. Keith would not even attempt to guess at its length but in the fading daylight he was just able to make out its colouring; a ringed body, red, black and white rings, the fearsome snout jet-black. Colourful, deadly, its head only inches from the glass of the windscreen, staring inside intently. 'Keith, I don't want to look!' 'You don't have to. Close your eyes.' 'I can't, it's like I've 'got to look!'

A thought crossed his mind, one that would have been funny in any other situation except this. You paid a quid or so to go into a reptile house and gawp at snakes through glass but this bugger was getting a close-up of humans in a cage for free! Jesus, that was rich, it kind of put things in perspective, made you realise that when it came down to the law of the jungle Man counted for nothing. 'Keith, I can't stand it any longer!'

'Hang on, I'll try the battery again.' He knew before he turned the key that it wasn't going to be any good. This time the starter-motor didn't even turn over. The engine was as dead as the proverbial dodo, and even if it hadn't been he wondered if there was enough petrol in the tank to get them out of there. You're a stupid prick, Keith Doyle. The snake on the bonnet seemed to be laughing in agreement with him.

'We're stuck.' Kirsten was sobbing again. 'There's no way we're going to get out of here.'

'Don't be stupid, we're only yards from the village, the main street. I've only got to blow the horn and the soldiers will come on the run.'

'Blow it then.'

He pressed the klaxon button, knew even as he did so that it would not even muster up the force of a good fart. Simply because the horn worked off the battery like everything else on a vehicle—lights, flashers—the battery was the heart of a motor car, determined whether it lived or died. And Keith Doyle's van right now was very dead.

'I'll think of something. Don't panic.' He leaned across her and locked the door; as much to prevent her from leaping out as the snake from getting in. 'It can't get to us.'

'It's . . . horrible.'

'I wonder what species it is.' Talking for the sake of talking. 'It certainly isn't a rattler because I know what they look like.' A joke that did not sound funny.

'I don't care what sort it is,' she snapped. 'I just wish it was dead along with all its mates.'

It was dark now, the two people inside the vehicle could barely see each other's silhouettes. Even the dashboard lights were too faint to give off so much as a glow. But there was enough light for them to be able to make out the shape of the snake that held them prisoner. It had coiled itself up again, settled down on the bonnet, head up against the glass windscreen. Watching and waiting.

And the coral snake which had so recently witnessed the death of its mate at the hands of Man was in no hurry. Vengeance was within its grasp and there was no way it was going to allow its prisoners to escape. After it had killed them it would die because there would be nothing left to live for. It would wait.

'We can't stop here.'

Keith was relieved to hear Kirsten speak fairly normally, keeping her face turned away from the windscreen, pushing herself back into the seat.

'At the moment we can't do much else.' he answered. He remembered that the rear doors of the van were not locked but it did not really matter, no snake would be capable of turning the handle, and, in any case, the lock only functioned from the outside. Don't think about it. 'We'll just have to be patient. Somebody is bound to find us soon.'

He did not add that it was unlikely to be before morning. The searchers had called off the hunt for today; it would be seven o'clock before they recommenced. He and Kirsten were almost certainly there for the night.

It was going to be a long one.

PC KEN AYLOTT stared around the small room that for the past two years had been his office. It bore little resemblance to the neatly arranged room that had contained only a week ago two filing cabinets, a desk with some wire trays on it, telephone, a notice-board with warnings about such relatively harmless creatures as Colorado beetles pinned on it. Dull and boring but at least it had been his. Whatever his resentment about this out-of-the-way posting, he had had the small consolation of knowing that this was his pad and he was the boss. Now, within the space of a few days, all that had been taken from him.

The office was a shambles; piles of untidily heaped papers that would in all probability never be sorted and filed, a mountain of rubber boots in the corner, discarded clothing. If he had been in charge of operations the place would never have been allowed to get into this state. Damn it, he had been relegated to the status of office boy. Stop here and answer the phone, Aylott, radio us if anything important crops up. Your job is to hold the fort. The super made it sound important, like telling a child he was responsible for picking up his scattered toys; do your best and we'll check it over when we get back. You're not getting the chance to skive on outside operations. Not that Aylott particularly wanted to be out there with every chance of a rattler jumping at you out of the undergrowth.

Shirley, his wife, was asleep in the police house adjoining the official office block. She didn't seem to be able to grasp that Stainforth was a dead-end job, said quite calmly that she would be happy to stay here for the rest of her life, buy one of those semis in the village after Ken retired in another fifteen years. Fifteen years, Jesus wept! Ken Aylott could weep if he stopped to think about it too long.

Of course, it was the Raglan case that was the sole reason for his posting to Stainforth, A balls-up, the classical clanger that a copper on a Manchester beat should not have dropped. He'd picked up Raglan, the man who had committed a dozen horrific sex murders and questioned him. He should have held the bastard, but at the time the man's story seemed genuine enough. The policeman had fallen for a false name and address and a volume of lies thrown in, a few scribblings in his notebook that he had not thought worth the paperwork so he'd let it go at that, and Raglan too. Three months and six corpses later the CID had nailed Raglan and everything came out. You could have saved us millions of pounds and six lives as well, copper, if you had done your job properly on the night of 10 January. Every rookie makes a mistake, some bigger than others. This will go against you.

'It wasn't your fault," Shirley had said. She had stuck by him as she invariably did in everything. 'They can't blame you, you weren't to know.'

Kick PC Aylott's arse. Hard. If it hadn't been for an acute shortage of manpower due to the police commitment on manning picket lines Ken might well have had his arse kicked even harder, right out of the Force. He spent weeks away from home in the daily turmoil of shoving, yelling crowds, had a week in hospital when he was unfortunate enough to have a half-brick land on his head. And then, within a fortnight of the settlement of the long dispute, he received the Stainforth posting.