Requiem

by Clare Francis

  ‘An’ the rest – I saw them off too,’ Campbell scoffed with pride.

  A small worm of alarm turned in Daisy’s stomach. ‘The rest?’

  Mrs Bell answered: ‘The social services.’

  ‘Sheep,’ Campbell declared. ‘Followed the others like sheep.’

  Mrs Bell said: ‘They wanted me to agree to Adrian goin’ back to hospital.’

  ‘What did you tell them?’

  Campbell answered for her again, pointing with a dramatic gesture towards the front room. ‘That lad leaves here over ma dead body, that’s what I told them.’

  ‘Our doctor spoke for us,’ Mrs Bell explained quietly. ‘He’s known Adrian from birth.’

  ‘Over ma dead body,’ Campbell echoed, slapping his palm on the table.

  ‘And they accepted that, did they, Mrs Bell? Your doctor’s opinion?’

  ‘Aye, they seemed to. Although that hasna’ prevented them from returnin’ now an’ again. To see how Adrian is managin’ – that’s how they explain it.’

  ‘Pushin’ their noses in where they’re not wanted,’ Campbell rumbled menacingly.

  Daisy exchanged a glance with Mrs Bell, and saw in her face the knowledge that, but for the actions of the local doctor, things might have gone very differently.

  Campbell, leaning forward, stabbed a finger at Daisy. ‘Now this compensation business – what about these landowners, the folk makin’ the money? Surely in God’s name, they canna’ escape fault!’

  ‘They might be held liable for a small share of the blame,’ Daisy began carefully. ‘But even if everything was proved in our favour, they might well plead good faith and get away with it.’

  Campbell gave a fierce jerk of his head. ‘What about the makers? The chemical people?’

  ‘We don’t know who they are,’ Daisy pointed out.

  ‘And if we did?’

  ‘If we did, it wouldn’t make that much difference.’

  ‘How can that be? They’re makin’ an’ sellin’ the stuff, are they not? Is that not negligent?’

  ‘Oh that we could take them on, Mr Campbell. But negligence – or anything else for that matter – would be impossibly difficult to prove, and they’d throw everything they’d got into it – ’

  ‘Och, it’s the money that talks, is it?’

  ‘Well, yes – I’m rather afraid it is.’

  There was a pause. Mrs Bell brought the teapot round again.

  Campbell sat back, stretching his arms forward and splaying his broad hands palms-down on the table. His anger seemed to have given way to a genuine if dogged concern. ‘So – his chances are na’ very good?’

  ‘At the moment, not brilliant,’ Daisy admitted. ‘Not unless we find more to go on.’

  ‘An’ this is what the lawyer people say, is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The experts, eh?’ He rolled the words round his mouth with contempt and Daisy thought that perhaps this wasn’t the time to admit to her qualifications.

  ‘I see, I see …’ Campbell said musingly. ‘So what must be done to start things movin’ along the right road?’

  ‘I suppose there are two – no, three – priorities,’ she said. ‘The first must be to get Adrian the best medical attention. We’re not talking about instant cures, I’m afraid, but there’s one specialist we usually recommend. I might be able to arrange for him to come up and see Adrian here.’ As she said it she wondered how she could swing the expense of getting Peasedale’s ally, Roper, to Scotland without Alan finding out. ‘After that, well, we’d need to establish the name of the operators – the flying people – and the chemical they used.’

  ‘Right,’ Campbell said briskly. ‘We canna’ arrive before we begin, eh?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You arrange the doctor, fine. The rest, you can leave it to me.’

  Daisy looked at him uncertainly. ‘The rest?’

  ‘You said – we canna’ proceed until we have some facts, correct?’

  ‘Facts would certainly help – ’

  ‘Aye, an’ I’ll be the man to find them.’

  Daisy gave a nervous smile. ‘And – er – how are you going to achieve that?’

  Campbell stood up suddenly, pushing his chair back with a loud scraping noise. ‘People not so very far from here know the answers to the question, do they not?’

  ‘I expect they do,’ Daisy agreed, thinking of the Willis Bain manager on the next-door estate and wondering what sort of information-extraction methods Campbell could possibly have in mind. It occurred to her that having Campbell on their side was going to be a liability of the most massive kind. ‘But how exactly do you intend to persuade these people to tell you what you want to know, Mr Campbell?’

  He didn’t reply but gave her a long cautionary stare, as if she should have known better than to ask.

  From the sidelines Mrs Bell gave an anxious: ‘Alistair.’

  ‘An’ then?’ he exclaimed, twisting round to shoot her an angry glance. ‘They canna’ be so hard to find, these people. The flyin’ company, they might deny all knowledge. But the aeroplane Adrian saw in the forest there’ – he jabbed a finger in the direction of the hill – ‘that was real enough, was it not? An’ there was a man flyin’ it, was there not? They canna’ have vanished into the mist. They canna’ be so hard to find.’ He added ominously: ‘One way or another.’

  ‘We did make the fullest possible enquiries,’ Brayfield ventured, sounding mildly defensive. ‘Throughout Scotland.’

  ‘An’ then?’ Campbell retorted. ‘Scotland is not yet the centre of the planet, is it?’

  Despite everything, Daisy found herself warming slightly to Mr Campbell. Whatever his shortcomings he couldn’t be accused of being a lily-liver. Having met enough apathy in her time to run even the most inefficient nationalized industry, this threat of red-blooded action made something of a change. It was unfortunate that it was going in such an aggressive and potentially damaging direction.

  Plucking his jacket from the back of the chair, Campbell thrust himself into it as if he were about to go and take on the world that very instant.

  Taking a card from her voluminous carpetbag, Daisy got up and followed him down the passage. ‘If you find anything out, you’ll let me know?’ she called.

  He turned and, taking her card, read it slowly. ‘Aye,’ he said finally and, pushing the card deep into an inside pocket, opened the door.

  Daisy followed him towards the gate. In flagrant violation of Alan’s policy guidelines, she said: ‘Don’t think we won’t give Adrian’s case our support, Mr Campbell, because we will. I just didn’t want you to think it was going to be easy.’

  ‘Aye … Nothin’s easy in this life.’ He stood firm against the wind, a rock in a stormy sea.

  Daisy asked: ‘Is it far to Glen Ashard from here?’

  Campbell turned his head and stared at her, the fierceness glittering in his eyes.

  ‘Not so far,’ he said.

  Daisy would have asked more but a gust straight from the Arctic blasted up the lane and, with a quick farewell, she hurried back towards the shelter of the house.

  But Campbell came after her. ‘You know Mackenzie then?’ he demanded, catching her at the door.

  ‘A little.’

  ‘You’ll be seein’ him while you’re here?’

  ‘I wish I was,’ Daisy said truthfully.

  Campbell followed her into the hall, standing so close over her that she had to twist her head to look up at him. ‘That’s a regret,’ he said, ‘a real regret.’ He hesitated then seemed to make up his mind about something. ‘It’s the same sickness,’ he said.

  That took a moment to sink in. ‘What is?’

  ‘Mrs Mackenzie. Her sickness. The same as young Adrian’s. There’s no doubt in ma mind.’

  ‘But she inhaled wood preservative.’

  ‘Mebbe. But she could have inhaled a lot more without the realization of it, could she not?’

  ‘Why do you think s
o?’

  ‘Och, the look of her!’ he exclaimed. ‘The features of the sickness.’

  Daisy was doubtful but curious. ‘You’ve seen her? Alusha Mackenzie?’

  He looked shifty. ‘Not close up, like I am to you, but close enough. She canna’ hardly walk. An’ thin – she’s no more than bones. Aye, it’s the same thing all right. There’s no doubt in ma mind.’

  Daisy must have looked unconvinced because Campbell hurried on. ‘Her skin – it has no colour, just like the boy’s. An’ she sleeps long hours.’ He looked mildly embarrassed. ‘At least, so I’ve heard. But most significant’ – he paused to add weight to his words – ‘she’s also right next to Willis Bain forest.’

  Suddenly Daisy realized what had struck a chord when Mrs Bell had described the way Adrian mixed up black for white and table for chair. She remembered Nick Mackenzie sitting in Peasedale’s window, his elbow on the sill, his eyes screwed up against the brilliant light; she heard his voice describing his wife’s symptoms, and the way she interchanged words of quite opposite meanings.

  The same illness? The same chemical? It was possible. Of course it was possible. The geography alone was reason for suspicion.

  With Campbell’s words echoing in her mind, the idea took root and kept her occupied all the way back to London.

  Dublensky had that wonderful feeling he always got when spring arrived – and the spring came one hell of a lot sooner in Virginia than it did in Chicago. Already the chestnuts were bristling with buds, the birds yelling their heads off. He felt like hollering right back at them, except that his neighbours – and there were a few fellow employees of the Allentown Chemical Company among them – might think he’d finally gone nuts. They already thought he was dangerously close to being certifiable because he cycled five miles to work each day and five miles back, an idea that seemed to sting his car-driving neighbours into nervous confusion.

  The journey took twenty minutes on his ten-speed racer and, though the Allentown Chemical Company’s works were not the prettiest of sights in the world and the air around it was not perhaps the sweetest, he always felt better for having been out of doors and taken the exercise.

  This morning he arrived in his office, feeling like he could conquer the world. Before settling down to work – and maybe even to conquering the more mundane paperwork which seemed to cover every inch of his desk – he sat quietly for a moment, basking in the warmth of his good fortune. Anne had only last week landed a grant to run a marriage rehabilitation project, and would be setting up shop in a couple of months’ time. Tad was doing really great in school: he’d made the seventh grade, the junior football team and won a math prize. A math prize, for heaven’s sake. The boy was going to be a genius. Well, if not a genius, then a candidate for a top college. Perhaps even Yale. Why not? Dublensky had had to sweat his way through Columbia with precious little parental backup and even less money. Tad would have none of those disadvantages.

  And Dublensky himself? Well, he was happy – yes, happy. The Allentown Chemical Company might not be the hub of the universe, and the chlorine-based water-purification products the company manufactured might not be of earth-shattering importance, but they were worthwhile, they added something to the wellbeing of mankind, and he had independence, he ran his own department, he was well paid. What more could a man want?

  He hummed as he started on the first stack of papers, and was quickly distracted by the latest issue of Practical Scientist. There was a four-paragraph item on Morton-Kreiger, he noticed, reporting on the loss of the company’s final appeal against the EPA ban on Aldeb. The item closed with a mention of Silveron, and Morton-Kreiger’s high hopes for it. Gertholm was briefly quoted as saying he was proud of the company’s steady move towards safer cost-effective products.

  Dublensky felt amazement and anxiety in equal and bewildering quantities. When he had last contacted Mary Cummins in Chicago just a couple of weeks ago, she had informed him that the results of the new trials on Silveron were due at any moment. Yet here was MKI’s own president apparently unaware of what the results must surely contain. Otherwise, how could he be inflating the product like this? It was extraordinary how the company functioned sometimes, like an amorphous monster with several brains, none of them interconnected.

  The office came to life around him. Still feeling aggrieved, he put the magazine on one side while he dealt with the day’s incoming mail. There wasn’t a great deal of it, for which he was extremely thankful, just two or three business letters and the usual collection of circulars, memos and journals. Plus, at the bottom, a typewritten envelope emblazoned ‘Strictly Personal’ with an Aurora, Illinois, postmark.

  The letter was from Burt, the physician who’d been treating the sick workers from the Aurora plant. He was writing to say that one of the original workers had just had a diagnosis of lymph cancer and it was Burt’s opinion that this was a direct result of the man’s exposure to Silveron. The other two patients were still having severe health problems. Their personalities had changed, their reactions had slowed, their brains were affected in some way that was impossible to measure by any available tests. They also had a multitude of minor symptoms, ranging from eye problems, kidney and liver pain, digestive malfunction, myalgia, severe weight loss – you name it, he said, they seemed to have it.

  Dublensky gave a moment’s thought to the unfortunate victims. However remote he himself had been from events, he couldn’t help feeling the weight of responsibility.

  What was more, Burt went on, he was getting new patients from the plant, one who was suffering from similar symptoms, and another three with vaguer ailments that, though not so serious, were still giving him cause for concern. What the hell was going on? he wanted to know. Why weren’t the new safety measures at the plant having any effect? And if they weren’t effective, why hadn’t they been reviewed? Or perhaps there weren’t any new safety measures? he wrote, underlining the question twice. Perhaps the company had been pulling the wool over his eyes. What did Dublensky have to say about that?

  Oh, he’d been given assurances, Burt continued. Dublensky’s successor, Dr Mary Cummins, had given him a pledge only the previous week – but now he was damned certain he was being given the run around. Dr Cummins was saying that the product had passed its new toxicity trials with flying colours. How could this be? What did Dublensky know?

  Dublensky thought: That’s a very good question.

  Burt finished by saying he was passing his case notes to the Environmental Protection Agency, and to the workers’ union, and that if there wasn’t a positive response from Morton-Kreiger soon in the form of confirmation of their toxicity results, he’d be forced to think of approaching the press too.

  Dublensky sat back, stunned. Silveron passing its new trials with flying colours? It wasn’t possible. He didn’t believe it, either as a manager or a scientist. Silveron was trouble, he sensed it, he knew it.

  He grabbed a piece of paper to draft a letter, a letter that in his mind’s eye was going to be so hot that it wouldn’t touch the envelope for smoke. Then, breaking off suddenly, he hesitated. Over the last year he’d scorched plenty of paper, he’d fired salvo after salvo of documents and letters in the direction of the MKI management, and look where it had got him. He could almost hear Anne’s answer to that one: in Allentown, Virginia, a bought and silenced man.

  He wrenched the phone off its cradle and, before he had time to change his mind, dialled head office in Chicago. He had intended to speak to Mary Cummins, but at the last minute found himself asking for Don Reedy.

  ‘What the hell’s this with the results on the Silveron trials, Don?’ he heard himself bark the moment Don answered.

  ‘The results, John? But they’re not available yet.’

  Dublensky made a supreme effort to keep his voice low and reasonable. ‘According to my information, Mary Cummins already has the results.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s possible, John. But why don’t you ask her?’

&nb
sp; ‘I’m asking you.’

  A pause. Reedy’s tone hardened. ‘Listen, John, we’ll let you have the results when they become available, as a courtesy. But I must stress that it’s a courtesy. Silveron isn’t your baby now, John. You know, it might be a good idea to remember that in future.’

  Dublensky said with unusual firmness: ‘So when are the results due, Don?’

  ‘Shortly.’

  ‘That’s what you told me last time, Don. Everyone keeps telling me that. But when is shortly, Don? And what are the results going to say exactly?’

  ‘Say? How can I know that? What a question, John.’ Reedy’s voice was heavy with impatience. ‘They’re trials, for heaven’s sake. We can’t know the results until they’re complete, you know that.’

  ‘But LKY must have given you an intimation.’

  Another pause. ‘It’s TroChem. TroChem are doing the trials.’

  ‘I’m talking about the new trials,’ Dublensky explained. ‘TroChem did the original trials, LKY Laboratories are doing the new trials.’

  ‘I don’t know where you got that idea from. It’s Tro-Chem. This time and last time too.’

  Dublensky felt himself go cold.

  ‘Listen, I’ve got to rush, John. A meeting – ’

  ‘But Mary Cummins – she told me LKY was doing it!’

  ‘I’m sure there’s an explanation. We might have put the job out to tender. Yes, in fact, I’m sure we did. Maybe we considered LKY.’

  Might have put the job out to tender. The vagueness was almost laughable. Reedy, more than anyone, knew exactly what job was going to tender.

  ‘Why TroChem? Why, Don?’

  ‘What the hell – I don’t know. But what does it matter?’

  ‘Why did we choose TroChem again, Don?’

  Reedy sighed deeply. ‘Because they’re efficient, competitive and – oh, for God’s sake, John.’

  ‘And because they produce favourable results? I mean, don’t they? Nice and favourable.’

  Reedy’s tone shifted again. ‘You’re letting your emotions rule your judgement, John,’ he said coldly.

  But Dublensky had the bit between his teeth. He had never realized he could sustain such a level of anger. ‘Why TroChem, Don? Could it be because we can rely on them, huh? I mean, because we could be sure the results would be helped along a little, huh? Massaged – isn’t that what they call it? Isn’t that the right word, Don? Or hadn’t you noticed the results came through so good – ’