Requiem

by Clare Francis

  ‘I said about the sheep.’

  ‘And he said to move them?’

  Adrian blinked his agreement.

  ‘What happened to the sheep?’ Daisy asked.

  ‘They took sick,’ Brayfield said. ‘Though it took some time. How long was it, Adrian, some months?’

  Adrian took a breath that was almost a sigh. ‘Aye. Two, three months.’

  ‘They were taken for slaughter and examination.’

  ‘And what did that show?’ Daisy asked, trying to capture Adrian’s attention.

  Adrian stared fixedly at a point somewhere between the bedcovers and the window. He seemed to be shutting himself off from the conversation, as if the visit was already too much for him.

  ‘There were no laboratories that could do the right tests,’ Brayfield explained.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The veterinarians, they use the Ministry of Agriculture labs, but they’re not equipped for pesticide tests.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you know it!’ declared Daisy for Adrian’s benefit. She caught him stealing a glance at her and, before he could look away, pulled a conspiratorial face at him. ‘And what about you, Adrian? Did they do any tests on you?’

  It was a moment before he responded, raising one of his thin fingers to point at his arm. ‘Blood,’ he whispered.

  ‘And they tested it for pesticides?’

  ‘We arranged it,’ said Brayfield. ‘In November.’

  ‘And they found nothing?’ Daisy guessed. ‘Well, they wouldn’t, I’m afraid, not so long after the event. You really have to be tested straight away. What about a tissue biopsy, Adrian, did they do that?’ She explained: ‘A bit of your arm. Or sometimes your bum, if you’ll excuse the expression.’

  A glimmer of a smile.

  ‘Not even a sliver? Didn’t sit you on a bacon slicer?’

  He gave a small giggle and she risked reaching forward to touch his hand. He still wouldn’t look at her, but he didn’t pull away either.

  ‘They did all the standard tests,’ Brayfield said. ‘Or so they informed Mrs Bell.’ He spoke over his shoulder: ‘Is that not right, Mrs Bell?’

  ‘And?’ Daisy asked.

  Brayfield shook his head.

  ‘So they found nothing?’ she said to Adrian.

  The smile had gone, he was looking blank again.

  ‘So what have they decided is wrong with you?’ Daisy had never believed in beating about the bush with sick people or children.

  Coming up behind Daisy, Adrian’s mother said firmly: ‘They canna’ be sure. But they do know he’ll mend in time.’ She spoke in the uplifting tone people use to convince themselves, as much as others, of something they desperately want to be true.

  ‘And treatment? What have they given you?’

  Adrian’s eyes travelled towards a table at the head of the bed. Daisy had already spotted the rows of prescription drugs, and had only been waiting for an excuse to examine them. Anti-depressants. Tranquillisers. Antibiotics. Not what Peasedale or any half-knowledgeable physician would have recommended, and that was putting it mildly. In fact they would have been horrified. But this wasn’t the moment to say so.

  Mrs Bell, looking defensive, her eyes on Daisy, had come to sit at the foot of the bed.

  ‘And your symptoms, Adrian?’ Daisy asked the boy. ‘What did you notice first?’

  He had to think about that. ‘I felt just … terrible. Dreadful sick.’ He frowned, and there was that puzzlement again, as if he were attempting to dredge a memory that refused to deliver.

  ‘His memory hasna’ recovered,’ confirmed Mrs Bell. ‘Half the time he has no knowledge of what month it is, let alone the day. He was never like that before, never.’ Her voice quivered with anger or bitterness, or both. ‘Then there was the sickness. He couldna’ eat, not for weeks. Lost a terrible amount of weight. We’ve got some back on him since, but not enough as you’d notice. Some foods don’t suit him any more. He canna’ take the things he used to love.’

  Brayfield prompted: ‘And you say he was dizzy, Mrs Bell?’

  ‘Aye. Terrible unsteady on his legs. Kept fallin’ over. An’ weak. Could barely lift his arms above his head. Feeble as a bairn. Terrible, terrible.’

  Daisy jotted the details in her notebook.

  ‘An’ sleep,’ Mrs Bell went on, ‘he slept all the hours God sent and a few more. I could never wake him. Sleep in the morning, sleep in the afternoon, an’ all the night too.’

  ‘Anything else, Mrs Bell?’

  ‘Eh …’ She considered. ‘His talkin’. Words – he couldna’ say his words.’

  ‘In what way exactly?’

  ‘Back about face. He’d say white an’ mean black. Or chair instead of table. Dinner instead of tea.’

  A memory stirred in Daisy’s brain, a connection to something in the past, though she couldn’t quite pin it down.

  Mrs Bell leaned towards Adrian and brushed her fingers lightly over his hair. She didn’t have to tell them he’d had enough. He looked drained, his skin grey beneath the bloom of ghastly spots. His eyelids were drooping, his mouth slack.

  In the hall Mrs Bell asked in her stolid way if they could continue their talk later, when she’d given Adrian his dinner. Daisy and Brayfield used the time to climb the hill and inspect the site of Adrian’s accident.

  Brayfield indicated the forest at the top of the field. ‘That is the place,’ he said, raising his voice above the wind. ‘It’s not Commission land, I need hardly say.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

  ‘If it was, there would not be any problem in knowing what happened. The Forestry Commission are not perfect, but they are a sight more safety conscious than the private landowners. The Commission is unionized, and there’s not one of our members who is not aware of who comes first in the firing line with these chemicals.’

  Daisy hobbled over the grass tussocks in her slippery-soled ankle-boots. She had imagined she’d dressed for the country, but had obviously been mistaken. ‘Who does the forest belong to then?’

  ‘An insurance outfit. The Salmon Group. One of those firms that invested in forestry a few years back when there were the tax incentives.’

  ‘But surely,’ Daisy panted, trying unsuccessfully to keep her hair from blowing into her eyes, ‘they could tell us. I mean, they must know what spray they used.’

  ‘Them? Och, no.’

  ‘What – they’re refusing?’

  ‘Not refusing. They are “anxious to assist us in our enquiries” – that is the way they put it at any rate. Which means they refer us to their forestry managers.’

  ‘Who are – ?’

  ‘Willis Bain.’ He spoke the name with contempt. ‘And they say it was fenitrothion.’

  ‘But you don’t think so?’

  ‘No.’ It was a long hoot of disbelief. ‘Fenitrothion has never done that sort of harm.’

  ‘So you think they’re lying?’

  ‘I think they are not telling the whole story.’

  They had reached the edge of the plantation of firs – or were they pines? Some thirty feet tall, they were planted in ranks so dense that their upper branches were interwoven like a thatch, and their lower branches were shrivelled and brown from the permanent darkness around their feet.

  ‘Lodgepole pine,’ Brayfield said. ‘See the crowns there, and the way the new growth is eaten back? That’s the pine beauty moth. The larvae, they eat the young needles.’

  ‘The trees don’t recover?’

  ‘Oh, they recover, so they tell me, but it takes years, and that is all lost income to the owners.’

  ‘But I thought spraying caused more problems than it solved. I thought you killed the natural predators and the bugs got resistant.’

  Brayfield snorted, and Daisy sensed the working man’s scorn for all theory, Green or otherwise. ‘One of our foresters took a look here. He says whatever they used on these trees, it worked fine.’

  Daisy swung her bag down from her shoulder, and pulled
out her sampling kit. ‘Well, let’s see what we’ve got.’

  She cut a three-inch square block of grass and topsoil, placed it in a container, sealed the lid, then, climbing into the plantation, repeated the operation, taking soil from under the branches of the trees.

  They set off down the hill again. The wind was blowing straight into their faces. Daisy, stiff with cold, a Kleenex clamped to her dripping nose, had to strain to hear what Brayfield was saying.

  ‘Willis Bain are denying the conversation with Adrian took place. They are saying they never sprayed this part of the forest at the time Adrian got his dose. They say they sprayed it back in May.’ Brayfield gave an exclamation of disgust. ‘When I pressed them again over what they had sprayed it with when they did spray it, they would not confirm the fenitrothion. Said it was not company policy to give that sort of information.’

  ‘How can they justify that?’ She had to raise her voice to be heard over the wind.

  Brayfield shrugged. ‘Who can say?’

  Daisy blew her nose, which had gone dead at the end. ‘Who would have done the spraying itself? Do Willis Bain have a plane?’

  ‘No, no. The work would have been contracted out.’

  ‘Another contractor?’ Daisy retorted. ‘Blimey, doesn’t anybody do anything themselves around here?’

  ‘Willis Bain would not say which company they used for the job. They said it was irrelevant.’

  ‘So the owners don’t know anything,’ she shouted, ‘and the managing agents say there was no spraying, no pilot, no plane and no damage to Adrian?’

  ‘We tried the local authorities and the local Health and Safety Executive to find out if and when they received the obligatory spray notifications, and they said what Willis Bain said, that this estate was done in May. Though they did at least give us the name of the flying company. We found them easily enough. They seemed right enough. They confirmed the May date. They even showed me their records.’

  ‘What was the chemical?’

  ‘They said that was for Willis Bain to tell me. Although they did go so far as to say the chemical was approved for aerial use.’

  They paused by the fence at the side of the house. ‘The only conclusion I can come to,’ Brayfield said, ‘is that the original spraying job did not cover this part of the forest, and that the moth suddenly spread and that someone panicked and called in another outfit in a hurry. Cowboys.’

  Low clouds raced overhead, obscuring the hills, sending giant shadows chasing across the valley. Daisy’s toes had lost all feeling, the cold seemed to have reached into her chest. ‘Wouldn’t there be some trace of them?’ she managed through clenched teeth.

  He shrugged. ‘You would think so. We tried the local air traffic control people. Nothing. So long as agricultural pilots keep below the commercial air lanes, then they do not have to tell anyone except the military. And the military controllers, they have no record of a crop-spraying aircraft at the right time and place.’

  They walked round to the gate. Brayfield held it open for her. ‘A dead end, I fear.’

  Well, that was nothing new, Daisy reflected. Investigations into chemical accidents were all about a succession of hurdles interspersed with dead ends.

  As they entered the house Daisy noticed that another car had appeared in the lane, parked behind their own.

  A man, presumably the car-owner, was sitting at the table in the kitchen. He was a big-boned fellow with a square face, a raw complexion and the broad bent nose and dog-eared features of a sporting man. His hair, which was an indistinct sandy-grey, was thin and clung to the mass of his considerable head. His eyes were small and quick-moving and creased up into a fierce expression, as if he regularly used it to frighten people.

  He rose from his seat, an exercise that took his head within inches of the ceiling. He was both tall and broad, a giant of a man.

  ‘My brother, Mr Campbell,’ said Mrs Bell.

  ‘Alistair Campbell,’ the big man grunted. He didn’t offer a hand, but dropped heavily back into his chair. ‘So? What’s to be done?’ he demanded, elbows thrust onto the table. Before they had the chance to take off their coats or sit down he persisted: ‘What are you proposin’?’

  Daisy raised her eyebrows imperceptibly at Brayfield. She had met aggressive barn-storming types before.

  As Daisy and Brayfield took chairs opposite each other on either side of Campbell, he threw yet more questions. Mrs Bell handed out cups of tea and retreated to the stove. Brayfield, who seemed unruffled by the verbal bludgeoning, calmly ran through a summary of the position, from the unhelpful response of the landowners to the evasiveness of Willis Bain.

  Campbell swept all this aside with an impatient gesture. ‘That’s all very fine but where does it get the lad, eh? Where does it get him? Nowhere, that’s where!’ He spoke in a strong accent. ‘He will be in need of care an’ good food. That takes money.’ He indicated his sister. ‘Meg here canna’ work, canna’ leave him, so what’s to be done, eh?’

  Brayfield looked to Daisy for help.

  ‘Well, there are two possible approaches, Mr Campbell,’ Daisy said cautiously. ‘First, we could use publicity, which is really all about shaming the opposition into coming to an arrangement – ’

  ‘But the money, what about the money?’

  ‘I was just getting to that, Mr Campbell. The idea is that the opposition would eventually decide that some sort of ex-gratia payment is preferable to having their names spread all over the papers the whole time.’

  Campbell swivelled on his chair and raised his shoulders at his sister. Neither of them seemed overly impressed by the idea.

  Daisy pressed on. ‘Another possibility is to go for a civil action in the courts, but I have to warn you that it could take years and an enormous amount of money, and even then – well, as things stand at present, it’s simply Adrian’s word against the managing agents’.’

  Campbell gave her a truculent stare. ‘So you’re sayin’ we should sit back and do nothin’!’

  ‘I didn’t quite say that,’ Daisy explained patiently. ‘What I’m saying is that the chances of getting full damages are not good. First, there’s the problem of proving that the events happened as Adrian says they did, which means finding evidence that a chemical was sprayed on this particular section of forest on the day Adrian says the accident happened. Even if we managed to establish those events, in the absence of the aircraft operators and a precise identification of the chemical, we’d only have Willis Bain to go for, and the judge might decide that the company were only, say, fifty per cent liable, which means Adrian’s award would get marked down by a half.’ She took a sip of the dark tea.

  ‘And then there’s the matter of the permanence of Adrian’s disability,’ she went on. ‘If Adrian recovers, well, the claim would by definition hardly be worth pursuing. Unfortunately there’s only one way to find out if he’s going to recover, and that’s to wait and see. At least another six months, I would have thought. Just getting proceedings started can be a very expensive business, you see, so it’s hardly worth going to the trouble before then. One would hope to get legal aid, of course, but that’s very far from automatic in civil cases like this.’ She took another sip of tea to see if the brew improved with familiarity, but it didn’t.

  ‘Then,’ she continued, ‘just when you might reasonably think you were getting somewhere, you’d face the hardest part of all – persuading the medical experts to agree that the chemical, whatever it was, was indeed responsible for Adrian’s illness, and that his symptoms weren’t the result of something else altogether, something unconnected with the accident.’

  A spark of complicity passed between Campbell and his sister. It was the briefest of glances, little more than a flicker, but the warning lights came on in Daisy’s brain.

  ‘What have the doctors said so far?’ she asked abruptly.

  Campbell’s brows shot together and he grunted, a deep growl of a sound, and Daisy was reminded of a large bear.
/>   It was Mrs Bell who answered. ‘When they first took him into the hospital – at the outset, it was, for two weeks – they said he would recover, that it was just a matter of time. Then, come September, when he was worse, they wanted him in Glasgow. He was there five weeks. He saw two, mebbe three of the specialists. At first they spoke of the chemical all the time, the likely nature of it. They seemed hopeful. They spoke about gettin’ him better. They were kind to Adrian, they couldna’ do enough for him. Then …’ She drew in her lips. ‘Then it changed. Adrian was given to other doctors, ones I’d never seen before, ones they never told me about. But even then I didna’ realize …’ She gave a short sigh. ‘I didna’ see that things had changed … Not until Adrian became distressed, not until … At first he wouldna’ talk to me. An’ when I asked the staff, they wouldna’ talk to me either. They tried to avoid me. It was as if – ’ She broke off suddenly and, looking down at the table, picked harshly at the edge of the formica with her work-stained nails. ‘Finally they took me into a room an’ told me that, although the chemical might have caused a problem at the start, there was no reason it should now, that Adrian should be better. They said the illness he had now was in his mind. They had a name for it. They called it school phobia. They said it was to do with the death of his father. They said I was – ’ She clamped her teeth onto her lower lip. ‘They said I might not realize it directly, but that I was overprotectin’ Adrian … that I was encouragin’ ma own son to be ill.’

  Daisy felt the customary stab of anger that this sort of injustice never failed to arouse in her. She said what she could, telling Mrs Bell that for every doctor who thought like that there was another who was prepared to take chemical damage seriously, but that the science of toxicity was in its infancy, that it was an umbrella science covering an enormous spread of specialities and requiring large teams of scientists which few governments were prepared to fund.

  ‘They sent the education people around,’ Campbell announced with a sharp exclamation of contempt. ‘Tellin’ Meg here to get Adrian back to school or else. I gave them or else all right, I can tell you.’

  Daisy thought: I bet you did.