The Peco Incident

by Des Hunt

  After that first time, I started visiting Murph’s after school and during the holidays. I would help him clean out the cages, shift birds around, and treat those that got sick. He also taught me about native birds and other animals, which is how I became a bit of a know-all about the wildlife on the peninsula. Murph could tell you things about the local animals that you would never find in any book.

  Of course, Nick knew none of this and when he first saw Murph, all he saw was a crazy guy. We were sitting out the front of a café having a drink, talking about the chook farm, when Nick began to stare at the pub across the road.

  ‘Do you see what that old guy’s doing,’ he said after a while.

  I turned and saw Murph sitting outside at one of the smokers’ tables. ‘Yeah, he’s rolling a cigarette,’ I said with a smile.

  ‘But look at the size of it.’

  I shrugged. ‘Yeah, so? Maybe he likes a long cigarette.’

  ‘That’s as long as my arm?’

  It wasn’t. To be precise, it was thirty centimetres long. Murph had an unlimited supply of these extra-long tissue papers. Normally he would roll one and then cut it into four normalsized cigarettes — enough to last him a couple of hours. But if people were watching, he would sometimes light the whole thirty centimetres and smoke it as if that’s what he always did.

  He must have seen Nick’s reaction, because when he’d finished rolling he put the thing in his mouth and lit it.

  Nick stared in disbelief.

  Unfortunately, the effect was destroyed when Murph inhaled and that triggered one of his noisy coughing fits.

  ‘C’mon,’ I said, pushing back on my chair. ‘Let’s go over and I’ll introduce you.’

  Nick’s jaw dropped. ‘You know him? You know that crazy guy?’

  ‘Yeah, he’s OK. Do you want to meet him or not?’

  Murph had stopped coughing by the time we got to the other side of the road.

  ‘Gidday,’ he said to me. ‘Saw you over there. Who’s your mate?’

  I introduced Nick.

  ‘Take a seat,’ said Murph, indicating the rusty bar stools as if they were lounge chairs in his home. ‘I’d offer you a drink, but I see you’ve just had one.’

  We sat. Murph took another suck on the cigarette.

  ‘How long does it take to smoke that?’ asked Nick.

  Murph studied the thing for a moment. ‘About half an hour.’ Then he smiled and added, ‘But I normally have them a bit shorter. He pulled a small pair of scissors from his pocket and cut the cigarette into four. He tucked three away in his tobacco pouch and put the lit one back into his mouth.

  He then turned to me. ‘School holidays, is it?’

  I nodded.

  ‘So what you been doing?’

  ‘Looking for dead birds,’ I replied.

  Instantly, Murph’s head jerked up. He took a long drag on his cigarette, looking around to see if anyone was near. ‘Where was this?’ he whispered.

  ‘The chook farm.’ I then gave him the whole story.

  Slowly, Murph relaxed. When I’d finished, he smoked silently for a while before asking, ‘So you reckon the chook farm’s the source?’

  ‘Seems like it.’

  He blew out a long plume of smoke. ‘I thought it might be my birds,’ he said grimly. ‘I had a couple of sick canaries the other day. One died. And now the sparrows around home are dropping like flies.’

  ‘What about the rest of your birds?’ I asked.

  ‘No problems since the canary. They all looked pretty good this morning when I fed them.’ A pause. ‘From what you say, I think the canary’s death is unrelated. Probably she was eggbound.’

  ‘It’s a killer virus,’ interrupted Nick. ‘I knew it was.’

  Murph looked at him sideways. ‘Oh, yeah! And how did you know that?’

  ‘It always is,’ said Nick, knowingly. ‘All these things are caused by viruses. They come from outer space.’

  Murph chuckled. ‘Yeah, and it’s going to kill us all. Right?’

  ‘Probably,’ said Nick. ‘We’re on a mission to tell the authorities.’

  The humour went from Murph’s face. He looked at me. ‘Are you?’

  ‘We’ll discuss it with Mum and Dad tonight.’

  Murph nodded slowly. ‘Yeah, I suppose it has to be done. You can bet that mongrel Bryce Shreeves at the chook farm won’t report it.’ He sucked on his cigarette. ‘Danny, if you do go to the authorities, can you try and keep my birds out of it? From what you say there’ll be enough dead birds around for them to collect without needing to come up to my place.’

  I nodded. ‘But can we go up and have a look?’

  He glanced at his watch and then up at the TAB screen mounted in the corner. ‘I’d take you up myself, except I’ve got some money on a nag in race four. I suppose you want to see Harriet?’ I nodded.

  ‘Yeah, well just go on up and take a gander.’ He smiled. ‘Give Harriet a kiss. She’ll be thrilled to see you.’

  Murph’s place was set in bush at the end of a narrow gully that climbed up the side of an old volcano. The road was steep and narrow — great to ride down, but tough going up. We were both puffing furiously by the time we got to the driveway.

  We could hear the sound of the birds through the trees well before we saw them: the chatter of the budgies, the songs from the canaries and the cheep, cheeping of the finches. There was also another sound — the distressed call of a bird caged against its will. It sounded like a tui, and was probably one of the injured native birds that Murph looked after.

  The one species of bird that was silent were the sparrows. Many of them were dead, lying around the outside of the aviaries. Others were drowsily pecking at the seeds spilled by the caged birds. It was a sorry sight.

  I got quite a shock when we checked the first aviary. The place was filthy. The water container was full of green slime, droppings had piled up under the perches, and the weeds Murph threw in to supplement their diet had heaped up until there was no room for the birds to move around on the ground. Normally, Murph kept the cages spotlessly clean. I regretted that I hadn’t been up to see him for some weeks, as it looked like he was having trouble coping on his own.

  With Nick’s help I set about cleaning up the worst of the mess, moving from one aviary to the next. It was in the canary house that we first saw sick birds. Three of them were down on the ground with their feathers all puffed up and their heads tucked under a wing. These must have got sick after Murph had checked them that morning.

  The last of the aviaries were down a small gully, hidden amongst some trees. These were the native-bird cages. The noisy tui had one leg in splints. However, that didn’t stop it flying from one side to the other, squealing like a pig. The way it was putting weight on the leg suggested it would soon be well enough to be released.

  The next cage had five blue penguins. They looked as if nothing had ever been wrong with them, but I knew that, like dozens of others over the years, they’d been covered in oil that had leaked from or been dumped by boats leaving the harbour. Murph kept them until he was sure they could again survive in the wild. The problem was, he didn’t have a permit to keep native birds, and that was one of the reasons he didn’t want the authorities snooping around.

  When we’d cleaned up the worst of the mess in the cages, we headed up to the house. It was time to introduce Nick to Harriet.

  As always, the back door was unlocked. I opened it and called out: ‘Harriet!’

  Nothing.

  ‘Hello! Is there anybody home?’

  ‘Hello!’ echoed a voice from deep within the house.

  We walked through into the kitchen.

  I gave a shrill whistle.

  Immediately there was a fluttering of wings, and within seconds a bird flew through the door and screeched to a halt on my shoulder. I turned my head sideways and she brought her beak forward and touched it on my lips.

  ‘Hi Danny! Hi Danny!’ she said.

  ‘Wow!’ said
Nick. ‘So that’s Harriet.’

  Harriet turned to him. ‘Hello! I’m Harriet the Parriet,’ she said.

  I burst out laughing at the look on Nick’s face. ‘She’s meant to say “Harriet the Parakeet”, but she never gets it right.’

  ‘How many words can she say?’

  ‘Heaps. Murph keeps teaching her new ones. You never know what she’ll say next. Ask her how old she is.’

  ‘How old are you, Harriet?’

  ‘Sixty-four!’

  ‘Is she really?’ asked Nick.

  ‘No! She gives a different number each time. She’s about twenty. Murph found her as an injured chick and looked after her until she was an adult. Then, when he went to release her, she decided to stay.’ I paused, wondering how much I should tell Nick. ‘She’s a New Zealand red-crowned parakeet. A native kakariki, which means Murph shouldn’t really have her. She’s the main reason why he doesn’t want us to tell anybody about the dead birds up here. He could get into lots of trouble.’

  Nick nodded. I put my hand up to Harriet and she climbed on. We studied her in silence, while she studied us back. Her mostly green body was capped with a crown of red, which extended past the eye to give her a real cheeky look. Her wings had bright blue edges and tips of grey. While not as spectacular as tropical parrots, I thought she looked fantastic.

  ‘Does she live inside all the time?’ asked Nick.

  ‘No, she goes out with Murph when he’s working in the aviaries. And sometimes she goes out by herself for a fly around.’

  ‘Then she could leave if she wanted to?’

  I nodded. ‘Except she doesn’t want to.’

  In the silence that followed, I leaned forward and let her climb on Nick’s shoulder. He turned his head and got a kiss. His face split into a big, beaming smile. Then he stood absolutely still while she explored his ear. This went on for quite some time. Never before had I seen Nick stay still for so long. It seemed that Harriet could do what dozens of teachers, doctors and medicines couldn’t — give Nicholas Clarke a feeling of peace with the world.

  CHAPTER 6

  After dinner that night, we had a family conference. First up, I told Mum and Dad what we’d discovered about the dead birds, including what we’d seen at Murph’s place. I also gave details about Brio and Roost, but not my suspicions. After all, what did I know about Scottish people? They probably reacted to things in a different way to us Kiwis.

  Mum’s response was to search the telephone book for which government department we should contact. It looked like it was BIRT, the Biosecurity Incident Response Team; they had an exotic pest and disease hotline.

  We didn’t call it, though. Dad stopped us. He reckoned we didn’t have enough evidence to start accusing Peco of having bird flu at their farm.

  ‘You don’t go accusing somebody like Bryce Shreeves without being very sure of your facts,’ he argued. ‘If we do this wrong, I could lose my job.’

  ‘How?’ asked Nick, indignantly.

  Dad turned to him. ‘Bryce Shreeves is on the council. What’s more, he’s the chair of the committee that controls recycling and rubbish disposal. If he wants to fire me — believe me, he can.’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ moaned Nick.

  ‘Fair or not, it’s the way of life, Nick,’ said Dad.

  ‘What if we got more evidence?’

  ‘How? The only way would be to go into the farm, and there’s no way we can do that.’ He paused. ‘Look, lots of other people must have seen the dead birds. Let them call BIRT. It’ll be much better that way.’

  Nick didn’t argue. Instead he slumped in his chair, fidgeting silently. The rest of us discussed it for a while longer without making any progress. In the end, the only decision we came to was about Cecil, the canary Murph had given us several Christmases ago. Ever since then, Cecil’s cage had been put out on the porch each morning, where he’d sing to the sparrows and other birds that enjoyed our garden. In the evening, we’d take him back into the house. However now, with the threat of disease around, we all agreed that he should stay inside, well away from his wild friends. Until this matter was over, he’d have to sing to himself.

  Sometime in the middle of the night, I woke sensing that something was wrong. The room was too quiet. The night before, Nick had been as restless in his sleep as he was when awake, but now I couldn’t hear a thing from him.

  It was too dark to see anything clearly, so I turned on my bedside lamp. Nick’s bed was empty. My first thought was that he was at the toilet or had gone for a drink. When he didn’t return after a couple of minutes, I sighed deeply before climbing out of bed.

  He wasn’t in the toilet, nor the kitchen or the lounge. The only other places were outside or in Mum and Dad’s room. I went to the back door. It was unlocked. Mum would never have left it like that. And when I went to get the torch from its usual place on the bench, I found that it, too, was missing.

  With a sinking feeling in my gut, I got the spare torch from a drawer and went out to the shed. My bike was missing.

  I knew exactly where he had gone. It would be the chook farm. He’d gone to get more evidence. As he would put it, he was on a mission.

  For half a minute or so, I considered going after him. Then I realized that doing so would get me into trouble as well. A better thing to do was tell Dad, and let him sort it out.

  Dad’s first thought was to leave it, thinking that Nick would never be able to climb the fence. But after I told him about the gap in the netting, he decided we needed to try to stop him before he got there.

  I figured that Nick didn’t know the roads to take any shortcuts, so I directed Dad along the route through Portobello. He sat hunched over the wheel with his eyes fixed on the road. I had a fair idea what he was thinking about: if this went wrong, then he could say goodbye to his job, and probably the chance of getting another one somewhere else — Bryce Shreeves was a very influential man.

  There was no sign of Nick anywhere along the route we’d travelled the previous afternoon. We found out why when we got to the gates of the chook farm. My bike was lying on the ground, almost blocking the gates. He’d made no attempt to hide it.

  ‘Pick it up and dump it in the back,’ said Dad, his voice exposing how tense he was.

  After that was done, he backed the ute into some bushes until it was mostly hidden.

  ‘Take me to the gap in the fence,’ he ordered, climbing out of the cab. ‘I bet the stupid fool is already in there.’

  We stopped at the place where we could see down into the compound. There were no security lights, but there were lights on in the two big sheds.

  ‘Do you think Nick has turned them on?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Dad. ‘They have lights on at night to make the chooks lay more eggs.’

  After a while, when we hadn’t seen any signs of humans, we continued moving along the fence.

  There was no doubting that Nick had gone into the place. The netting had been pulled back, forming a much bigger gap than we’d seen in daylight. Without hesitation, Dad held up the wire and ushered me through. Now we, too, were trespassers and breaking the law.

  I led the way towards the nearest big shed. When we got down to the paths, the noise of gravel crunching under our feet sounded like bursts of machine-gun fire. Surely anyone in the buildings would have heard our approach? Then, as we got closer, we became aware of a much louder noise: the cackling of frightened chooks.

  One of the big doors at the end of the shed was ajar. I was about to enter when Dad pulled me back.

  ‘Put this on,’ he said. He held out a disposable dust mask that he’d picked up in the workshop before we’d left. I put the elastic bands over my head, adjusting the length until the breathing pad was tight over my mouth and nose. After Dad had done the same with his, he nodded to go inside.

  Straight away I wished that we’d thought of bringing earplugs as well. Next, the heat of the place hit me, followed quickly by the stink, which somehow managed to filter thro
ugh the dust mask. It was more than the smell of chook poo; at a higher level again was the stench of death. We soon found out why.

  The cages were stacked four-high on either side of the aisle, staggered so that the droppings fell to the floor and not on the chooks below. It was hard to say how many birds were in each cage, because they were so tightly packed they scarcely had enough room to move. Some had their heads through the front netting, feeding from a trough that ran along all the cages. Below that was a wire net to catch the eggs.

  Those that still had feathers were a pleasant brown colour. Many were unfeathered, with pink skin. Then there were the ones blackened by death. They were mostly stuck to the bottom of the cages. Some were so rotten that body fluids dripped onto the floor.

  Not all the birds were making a noise. There were those too sick to do anything except wait for death. Soon they would be trampled down by the remaining birds, who, no doubt, would welcome the extra space. That was until they, too, got sick and died.

  And the chooks were not the only dead birds. Shreeves might have cleaned up most of the dead sparrows outside, but nothing had been done inside the shed. They were all over the floor. Some still lay in the food troughs where they had hoped for an easy meal; instead, they’d ended up with a deadly disease.

  We had walked almost the entire length of the first aisle before I remembered why we were there and began looking for Nick. Unless he’d climbed under the cages, he wasn’t on the aisle we were in. When we got to the end, Dad and I split, taking half of the shed each. My aisles were a repeat of the first — each one a nightmare of misery and death. Plus there was no sign of Nick, which meant we would have to do the same thing all over again in the other shed.