Requiem

by Clare Francis

  It was her illness that impressed them more than anything else. When it came to using police time, illness obviously ranked a long way above marital tiffs. He didn’t tell them quite how ill she was. Apart from anything else, he didn’t think it was any of their business.

  It began to rain, a thin spiky inconsequential rain, then, all too quickly, a more determined rain that spattered against his face and trickled down his neck. He gulped some coffee – unlaced – smoked two cigarettes in quick succession and endured Duncan’s well-meaning assurances.

  Everything was dreamlike, then all of a sudden he awoke again. The urgency flooded back into him and he pushed forward and began to argue with the police for an immediate return to the glen. The inspector, a soft-spoken man, listened with attention but not, apparently, conviction. There was no indication she had gone up the glen, was there? the inspector argued. It wasn’t very likely, was it, not on such a stormy day. Wouldn’t she have stayed closer to home? Particularly since she was so unwell.

  Forcing himself into a state of exaggerated calm, Nick repeated stubbornly: ‘We must search the glen!’

  ‘The main paths have already been covered, have they not, Mr Mackenzie? Would we not do better to – ’

  ‘The upper glen – no one’s been there!’

  ‘Why do you think she might have gone up there, Mr Mackenzie?’

  ‘Because – ’ But he was beyond speech, beyond explanation, his mind a nightmare of half-realized fears and confusions. Catching himself on the point of losing control, he withdrew some way into the darkness and paced back and forth, smoking hard. Just when he thought he’d got himself into some sort of shape, the inspector announced his plans for the search. It would be concentrated on the area around the house and would slowly expand outwards. The denser sections of forest and undergrowth would be left until daylight.

  The wind eased abruptly, and a heavier rain began to fall, a drenching pervasive rain that drummed on the roofs of the cars and kicked at the ground, so that people made for the shelter of the trees.

  Nick’s vision of Alusha shifted agonizingly: he saw the rain seeping into her clothes, saturating her already cold skin, freezing her slowly to death.

  He couldn’t stand it any longer. Striding away, he jumped into Duncan’s car, rammed it into reverse, and, twisting the wheel savagely, executed a tight turn.

  As he jammed the accelerator down and shot off up the glen he was aware of someone swinging into the back seat and slamming the door shut behind him. He glanced over his shoulder.

  ‘Duncan?’

  ‘No. It’s me, Alistair Campbell.’

  Nick considered telling the man, whoever he was, to bugger off, then thought better of it. He might be useful.

  The car bumped and leapt up the rough road. Nick didn’t slow until he reached the point just below Macinley’s Rock where his earlier search had ended. Then he parked and set off briskly up the main track, sweeping the undergrowth with his torch-beam. As if by some previous agreement, the other man cut down to the path by the side of the river and walked in parallel, so that the dull glint of his light was visible through the trees.

  Above Macinley’s Rock, Nick saw the other man’s light fall behind as it flickered slowly round the sides of the Great Pool. Eventually it came back onto the path and gradually drew level until they were once again in parallel. The wind had dwindled further and now the forest resounded to the steady drum and patter of the rain.

  Half a mile later the other man’s light rose to meet him as the lower path left the river and converged with the main track. The two men met without speaking and fell into step one behind the other.

  To the right the forest thickened: they had reached a dense stand of pines. Nick paused. The stand continued for perhaps half a mile. Beyond it there was nothing but open moor and grazing sheep. It was just possible she had got this far – it had occurred to him that the morphine might have made her feel unusually energetic – but no further. Quite apart from the distance and the climb, she didn’t like the darkness of the pine forest any more than she liked the bleakness of the open moor.

  Desperate for a smoke, he stepped into the shelter of the trees and reached inside his jacket. His packet was empty. The other man, watchful as some shadowy manservant, stepped forward and held out a packet which he illuminated with his torch. Nick stole a glance at him in the flare of the match, but didn’t recognize him.

  Their cigarettes lit, the two men started back down the track.

  Campbell spoke. ‘I could cross the river just by the pool there an’ follow down the other bank.’

  ‘No.’ The path was rough on the opposite side, the bank very steep. It wasn’t a possibility.

  ‘She couldna’ manage that, then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not so good at the walkin’?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ma sister’s lad’s the same. Canna’ hardly manage to leave the house.’

  What the hell was he talking about? Nick grunted negatively and hurried on, swinging his torch-beam purposefully from side to side. The rain dropped over the beam and cut across it like a curtain. He called Alusha’s name, and got the constant patter of the rain in return.

  ‘It’s the same malady, you know.’

  Christ, Nick thought savagely, what a time for obtuse social chat. He walked even faster, determined to shake the other man off.

  ‘It’s a chemical,’ the man persisted, matching his pace effortlessly to Nick’s. ‘They were usin’ it all over against the beauty moth. The lad, he got a dose of it in June, just before your wife. He’s not been right since.’

  Despite everything, a small memory triggered in Nick’s mind. A letter, something he’d received months ago – other cases, the name Campbell.

  There was something else though, something about the man’s voice, something familiar which he couldn’t quite place.

  ‘Not the same thing,’ Nick snapped with finality.

  Now it was Campbell’s turn to be silent. Eventually he murmured: ‘If you say so.’

  Suddenly Nick felt a jolt of recognition. The voice, the accent. Even the place. God. He swung his torch full onto Campbell. The face was square, with wet hair plastered down onto his forehead. The features were unfamiliar, but the build – oxlike and unusually tall – yes.

  ‘You.’

  Campbell raised a hand against the light.

  ‘Christ! Christ!’ Nick shook with rage. ‘It is you!’

  Campbell lowered his hand. ‘I have to say that I canna’ entirely deny the fact. But I’ve not touched a fish in this pool, not since June, an’ that’s the truth, Mr Mackenzie.’

  ‘Get the hell out of my sight!’ Nick turned on his heel and strode off, enraged by the intrusion, furious at the diversion. He went fast, swinging his torch rapidly, shouting Alusha’s name until his voice descended into feeble infuriating croaks. It was some time before he glanced back over his shoulder. No sign of a light on the track. Then he saw it, down on the river path once more, a soft pinprick flattened and blurred by the rain.

  He pressed on, suddenly aware of how long he’d been out of contact with Duncan and the main search party. Reaching the car, he jumped in and started up. Campbell could damned well walk back. Yet something made him switch off and get out again.

  There was no sign of a light. He yelled Campbell’s name.

  There was only the rushing of the water and the drumming of the rain, then a voice came echoing back. From above, from beyond the invisible bulk of Macinley’s Rock.

  Nick bawled: ‘Hurry.’

  The voice came again, rising above the deathly splatter of the rain. A long call that sounded like: ‘Here. O-v-e-r h-e-r-e.’

  Nick didn’t move. He was gripped by an indescribable fear.

  He waited, dreading the words, yet needing to hear them again.

  They came once more, as he knew they would.

  ‘O-v-e-r h-e-r-e.’

  Finally he moved. Each step felt more unreal than
the last; his body no longer belonged to him. He broke into an uneven stride, half run half walk, and made his way panting up the track until, abreast of Macinley’s Rock, he began to climb down the slope towards the water. Hitting rock, he stumbled and fell, landing heavily on his hip and dropping the torch. Picking it up again, he remembered, by a great effort of will, to shine the beam in front of him. He blundered through undergrowth, past massive stones and across a mossy bank until, finally, he reached the edge of the pool.

  ‘Here.’ The harsh cry was unexpectedly close.

  Nick shone the torch around, then down. The beam caught Campbell’s huddled form, crouched at the pool edge. He was cradling a bundle which lay half in, half out of the water.

  Campbell raised his head. His face was contorted into a terrible grimace. The bundle unfolded from his lap. First an arm, then a white face fell back over Campbell’s knees.

  Burning rage came over Nick like a hot sea, his brain exploded with pain.

  ‘Get off her, get off! You bastard! You bastard!’

  He was aware of screaming, aware of the other man moving away, aware, finally, of dropping to his knees and pulling Alusha onto his lap.

  Then the heat left him as suddenly as it had come, cooled by the ice of Alusha’s skin.

  Chapter 13

  THE BEAUTY MOTH didn’t live up to its name. Small, little more than an inch from wingtip to wingtip, a uniform and rather drab brown, it had no great claims to beauty although, when Daisy put her nose closer to the glass of the sample box, she saw that the upper wings were marked with an attractive and intricate tortoiseshell pattern.

  She commented: ‘It doesn’t look big enough to eat a whole forest.’

  The bugman shuffled his feet. ‘Well, the moth itself doesn’t, of course,’ he said with a quick smile. ‘It’s the larva that’s the gobbler.’ He pointed to a striped caterpillar impaled on the next pin.

  They walked back to the bugman’s office, which was situated in a modernish wing of the Edwardian country house that was the headquarters of the forestry research station. The office windows, partially obscured by stacks of files and papers, looked out onto a dense shrubbery and, beyond, to the tall forest that surrounded the grounds.

  Daisy asked: ‘What would a forest manager do then, if he had a bad outbreak of pine beauty moth?’

  The bugman settled in his chair. He was a bearded Welshman with the confident easy-going manner that comes from knowing his stuff and having the happy occasion to impart it. ‘You’d have to spray the forest,’ he said. ‘There’d be no way round that. But we’re developing virus applications that are absolutely specific to the moth and therefore very much safer – ’

  ‘Developing? They’re not in use then?’

  ‘Ah.’ He gave a sight of regret. ‘Still too expensive.’

  ‘So a private contractor would still use an insecticide?’

  ‘At the moment – yes.’

  ‘And what would he use? Can you give me a list of the most likely chemicals?’

  The bugman looked surprised. ‘A list? Well, I could try. But really, there’s only one in common use.’

  ‘Only one?’ Daisy echoed, adjusting rapidly to the likelihood of disappointment.

  The bugman rasped a hand over his beard and puckered his lip, as if considering the possibility that he might have overlooked something. ‘Aerial application, you said? No – there’s really only one.’

  Fenitrothion. He said the word slowly in case she wanted to copy it down. But there was no need. Fenitrothion was well known. It was an organophosphate that had been around for some time. If it had killed and maimed people on a regular basis the news would have seeped out by now. As it was, it didn’t even rate a mention on Catch’s ‘dirty dozen’ of the most dangerous chemicals. Although it was always possible that, despite everything, they had all been missing something.

  ‘And there’s really nothing else?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  There were questions she should ask, but her brain was thick with tiredness and it took a moment for her to grasp them.

  ‘What follow-up studies have been done on fenitrothion?’ she asked finally.

  ‘Ah!’ The bugman went to a shelf, selected two identical pamphlets and handed her one. The pamphlet was titled Population, Biology and Control of the Pine Beauty Moth. On the cover was a glossy photograph of the caterpillar, no longer the faded drab specimen of the show case but a smartly attired fellow in green, brown and white stripes, captured in the act of eating his way down a branch of pine needles.

  The bugman leafed through his copy. ‘There’s a summary of all the major impact studies … On birds mainly …’

  ‘What about the impact on people?’ she asked.

  ‘The operators, you mean? They have to take precautions, of course. Mixing the chemical, filling tanks and so on. They wear full gear – you know, space suits, masks.’ The bugman found his place in the pamphlet and read: ‘The effect on humans is … insignificant. Well, that sounds fairly definite, doesn’t it?’

  ‘What about people caught in the spray drift, people on the ground?’

  ‘Um …’ He referred again. ‘Not discussed here. Probably not enough people to study. They’re always careful to clear the area, you know, before they start spraying.’ He replaced the pamphlet on the shelf. ‘No, if you wanted to know more on that, you’d have to ask a toxicologist. Though I have to say I’ve never heard of anyone having any long-term health problems from fenitrothion.’

  ‘A plane that was spraying the beauty moth – would it have to be specially equipped?’

  ‘If it was using ultra-low-volume technique, yes.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Ah.’ He gleamed with quiet pride. ‘It’s what we’ve been pioneering. Much smaller chemical droplets, more efficiently distributed. Less chemical used, more effective, less damage to wildlife.’

  ‘So the plane, what would it need for that?’

  ‘Special atomisers. They fit them onto special arms under the wings.’

  ‘And this ultra-low technique, is it in wide use? Would there be many aircraft fitted up for it?’

  ‘Not yet,’ he said with the disappointment of an ideas man finding himself pitted against the inertia of the real world.

  ‘Otherwise … if a plane was using the old technique?’

  ‘Then the regular spray booms, I suppose. But they give you nasty big droplets, and you miss the larvae who aren’t right at the top of the canopy. A high miss rate.’

  A high miss rate. Perhaps in Loch Fyne they had suffered a high miss rate during an early spraying, and had needed to dose the forest again in a hurry.

  The Metro’s heater choked a stream of luke-warm air, and Daisy had turned onto the Farnham bypass before her feet began to defrost. Even then she couldn’t shake off a permanent sense of cold which seemed to have rooted itself low in her stomach. The drive back up the A3, far from being an opportunity to think, became a long exercise in staving off drowsiness and failing concentration. Maybe it was just lack of sleep; she had stayed up until one, sifting through the latest batch of case histories from EarthForce in Washington, going through the information from military air traffic control on the flights sanctioned in the Loch Fyne area. Then, when she’d finally got to bed, it had been to lie half-way between wakefulness and nightmare, her brain dogged by images of a featureless woman lying face down in water. Later, when she finally slept, it was to dream that Adrian, like Alusha Mackenzie, was dead.

  She found a parking meter at the back of King’s Cross, an unheard of stroke of fortune, and, dodging the ladies of the night who seemed to be out in force, she hurried through the litter-strewn streets to the office.

  Jenny was perched at her desk, clad from spiky head to booted toe in black, long fringes of jet beads trailing from her jacket sleeves, like the wings of a recently alighted raven. Crouched over the telephone, she waved a batch of papers at Daisy and raised her eyebrows to indicate their importan
ce.

  A mug of coffee sat steaming at Jenny’s elbow and, taking the papers in one hand, Daisy deftly removed the coffee with the other and headed for her office. Alan’s door was partially open and she could hear his cool reasonable murmurings as he talked to someone on the phone. She padded quickly past and slipped into her office, closing her door silently behind her. Alan had been trying to catch her for a couple of days now but, having a fair idea of what he wanted to talk about, she was not too keen to be caught.

  She sat down and, swigging at the coffee, glanced over the papers. They were copies of the legal correspondence on the Adrian Bell case which Mrs Bell had arranged for her solicitor to send over, though not without difficulty. Mrs Bell’s solicitor had not taken kindly to the idea of Catch’s involvement, and had responded to Daisy’s phone calls with what could only be described as resistance.

  Nonetheless, the correspondence was here, and there was quite a lot of it, including, she noted straight away, a letter from Willis Bain’s lawyers.

  The first part of the letter contained few surprises. Willis Bain absolutely denied any liability concerning the alleged accident. They also denied having treated the woodland next to the Bell home at any time during the previous June, or indeed in the weeks immediately adjacent to the alleged date in June. The block of forest in question had been sprayed only once during the year in question, in mid May, they said, when every possible safety procedure had been carried out: notifications posted to all neighbouring properties, including the Bells’, and the police and local authority informed in accordance with legal requirements. Furthermore, the spraying method had conformed to Ministry of Agriculture and Civil Aviation Authority guidelines. The pesticide used was fully approved for aerial use.