Purged

by Peter Laws

  A few of them heard that and shared glances that were hard to quantify.

  The man scratched his beard then leant into the window, suddenly intrigued. ‘Are you lot finally bringing this place down?’

  ‘We’re working on it. But for now, I need to speak to the boss in there. Got to build the case.’ Matt held up his fist in a sort of fight the power way.

  The bearded guy waited for a moment.

  ‘Do I look like a farmer?’

  He laughed and shook his head, ‘Nope, you look like a policeman.’ Then he waved his hand at the rest of his friends. They parted. ‘Let him through.’

  It wasn’t exactly a huge place, but he could spot at least three barns and two tractors. Seemed like a pretty substantial set-up to him. As he pulled into the courtyard and stepped out of the car he was shocked at the animal noise. Not the presence of it; it was a farm, after all. But the level of it. Pigs squealed, cows roared and somewhere something that sounded like a chicken squawked as if it was being boiled alive. The screech of it all merged into one long wail. Hellish.

  The ground was uneven, with muddy tyre tracks caked hard in the sun. Evidently the rains of Hemel hadn’t made it to Hobbs Hill at all. But then hadn’t Cardle always said it was the promised land?

  On the side of one of the barns was a painted wooden sign that said OFFICE. He headed over and knocked on the half-open door and waited for a few moments. When no answer came he pushed the door open all the way. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Yup?’

  He turned to find a tight-faced, stocky man in green overalls. He had a smear of something Matt hoped was mud across his cheek.

  ‘My name’s Matt Hunter. And you …?’

  ‘Dale Jennings.’

  ‘Well, Dale. I’m looking for Seth. Is he here?’

  ‘Was, an hour ago, but I reckon he must have popped into town. I know we needed teabags. Can I help?’

  ‘I’d really hoped to speak to Seth. It isn’t actually a business call.’

  ‘You from a newspaper? You look like you’re from a newspaper.’

  ‘Ha, no. Definitely not. I know him from church.’

  At that, the man’s eyebrows drew apart to a less intense distance. ‘Oh, right. Maybe you should try him at home, then?’

  Matt looked at the protesters, over on the other side of the wooden gate. They were settling themselves down with phones and iPads. Checking their Tinder until the next visitor. ‘How’s Seth handling all this attention?’

  ‘From them wasters? Doesn’t phase him a bit. Those lot are on a mission to turn everyone veggie, that’s all. Probably employed by Quorn or something to bring the meat industry down. That’s my theory, anyways. You eat meat?’

  ‘Like a Viking.’

  He smiled, ‘Then you’re alright with me.’

  ‘Are they affecting business?’

  ‘Bit, yeah. But it’s the supermarkets who are really kicking us in the nuts. This lot are our best mates compared to Tesco. You know how much we have to drop our prices to get our eggs in their store?’

  Matt shook his head.

  Dale looked to the left, trying to work it out. ‘Well, I can’t remember the exact figure off the top of my head. But it’s a lot. A hell of a lot.’

  Somebody must have stepped on one of those pigs, because a horrendous yelp suddenly came from one of the barns. It made Matt jump, probably because it sounded so human. But then the fox howls had already shown he wasn’t exactly an expert at working out what was human and what was animal.

  ‘Hey. Feel free to look around if you like. You can see how much these protesters exaggerate. Anyone who comes up here, I always tell ’em … look around. I keep saying to Seth, we need word to get out. Let people know that we’re not monsters like them lot think.’

  ‘You know what, Dale? I will have a look. Thanks.’

  ‘Good, and spread the word. Just don’t feed any of the animals. And if one of the pigs bites you in the testes, then that’s your hassle, not mine. Got it?’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

  ‘Well, don’t mind me … I’m off to clean shit off a cow’s face.’ Dale headed off to the field, grabbing a bucket with some brightyellow gloves hanging over the rim. Living the dream.

  Matt turned and went in the opposite direction, to where the psychotic pigs were crying out. He’d do each barn in turn but he wanted to get those hogs with human squeals out of the way first.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  He saw what he expected to see.

  Straw, grain and a whole lot of death row animals. Did they snort Dead Swine Walking! as the others wandered to their fate? Probably not. He wasn’t vegetarian. Wasn’t particularly an animal lover, to be fair. But seeing them gazing out through the wooden panels with that resigned, yeah-we’ve-worked-this-out look was kind of depressing. He’d seen documentaries about barbaric farms where artificially fattened pigs gasped for space in minuscule holding pens while they waited for the bolt gun. This was hardly as cramped as that. There was room for the animals to wander, to lie down.

  But not much.

  Matt had no idea how much floor space the current regulations prescribed but as he glanced from pen to pen he kept thinking, Seth Cardle, you are pushing it.

  There was one other thing he did notice, though. Something unexpected but important, and the knowledge of it opened up a whole new route of possibilities. Most people would walk into a place and think they were seeing it, but normally they weren’t seeing even half. Mostly, folks spent their life looking through tubes, paying little attention to what was around them.

  Matt had always been good at taking the tube away. It was one of the few things he remembered his dad teaching him. Notice stuff, boy. Notice it! It was probably the reason why religion came up so wanting … because he had bothered to observe it in extreme close-up. One of the reasons Larry Forbes kept inviting him along to crime scenes these days was that he had a habit of spotting stuff.

  And so his eyes searched every corner, every beam of those barns. And when the curve of something odd, nestled in a joist up near the roof, caught his gaze he pulled over a bale of hay and stood up on it. He had to push up on his tiptoes, making the bale wobble, to see exactly what that curve was.

  It was a little webcam, with an almost imperceptible black wire pinned to a beam, running up to the ceiling and out onto the roof. To a solar power cell?

  It wasn’t easy to find but he noticed another in the next barn, but not in the third. Either Cardle had put these cameras up for security reasons or maybe they’d been placed here by someone else. People who wanted to keep an eye on the conditions here. He smiled and headed out into the sun.

  The final barn was away from the others and it took a minute to reach it. As he walked towards it Matt spotted Dale over in the field. He was running after a cow shouting, ‘Bungle! Get back here, you ponce!’ His bucket of water was sloshing over the sides, splashing his overalls and turning them dark green. Matt almost stopped walking just so he could watch Dale potentially fall over. He could do with a little light relief.

  Instead he moved towards the final barn and immediately started to notice something strange. His nostrils were drawing in a different smell, unlike anything he had experienced so far at the farm. He tilted his head back and took a long sniff, like he often did whenever he walked into a baker’s shop.

  The odour was both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time but with every step closer he knew that what was creeping up his nose and through the pores of his skin wasn’t anything like warm bread. It was death.

  The barn was wooden, with a corrugated metal roof. He couldn’t see any windows, just a set of double doors with a Keep Out sign, painted in white on the back of what looked like a baking tray bolted to the wood. He pushed at the door expecting it to be locked, but it swung slowly open with an unsettling, human-sounding moan. Like a fairy tale witch was in there, waiting. The old wood looked damp and the place was dark. But the sun started to seep in as he opened the
door and stepped inside. It picked out the golden dust dancing in the air. Some long shafts of light shone through the cracks in the roof, like rods of light. Over on the barn wall he saw a wooden table, and above it, a rack of metal tools hanging from rusty hooks.

  He slapped his cheek as a fly whizzed past and escaped out into the fresh air. On the floor, two huge grooves ran through the mud and straw and at the end of them, in the very centre of the barn, was something utterly bizarre.

  It was a stainless-steel box, more like a windowless room. The sunlight didn’t stretch far enough to light it all up but the sun did fall on the bottom half, making it gleam. Set against the ancient-looking barn the metal contraption looked like a spaceship, and he half expected some alien to waddle out and say, Don’t fret about the missing women. They’re TEFL teachers on our planet now.

  The thing was fixed to some industrial-sized trolley, and a tow bar stuck out from it. The type you’d find on a caravan. But while the box was a similar size, this wasn’t something anyone would want to take a holiday in. The metal pipes that sprouted from it like fingers made that clear enough. That and the small but thick-looking door with a submarine-style wrench wheel and a row of gauges with tiny arrows, all set to zero.

  He leant in closer and saw that the markers were in both Fahrenheit and Celsius.

  ‘Gets up your nose, doesn’t it?’

  Matt’s body jerked in surprise and he spun his head.

  Dale was hovering in the doorway. ‘You’d think you’d fry up a pig and you’d get a bacon smell. But it don’t work that way. Worst smell in the world, that. But I just rub a bit of that stuff under my nose and it helps.’ He pointed to a tub of Vicks Vapour Rub on a wooden shelf.

  ‘So this is one big oven?’ Matt said.

  ‘Incinerator. Farms use them all the time to get rid of livestock that get ill. You can’t exactly just dump a dead hog in your wheelie bin, can you?’

  ‘I guess not … so this is permanently here? Do you get that many dead animals?’

  ‘Nah, Seth hired it for a few months. It’s one of the smaller ones, so we use it for pigs mostly. We use it for our own animals now and again but to be honest we mostly have it for other farms round here. We pick up their livestock and get rid of it for them. For a fee. Seth’s thinking about hiring something bigger so we can do cows.’

  ‘Do you make a lot of money doing that?’

  ‘Not really. I’m not even sure if it covers the cost of hiring the kit, but Seth’s got a vision. Says it might be our best bet against the supermarkets. Every little helps.’

  ‘And what do you think?’

  Dale laughed. ‘I keep telling him Tesco are probably going to start installing these bad boys in their car parks soon. They do everything, anyway. Give it twenty years and you’ll probably be able to chuck pensioners in these things, and still get the clubcard points.’ He pressed his lips together, in a vain attempt to keep his own laugh in.

  ‘Is it easy to operate?’

  ‘Piece of piss. Though one time I forgot to rip off the ear pin of a pig and the bloody thing got stuck in the grille. Took me forever to get it back out. So you take any pins or collars off.’

  Matt had been pacing around the machine. But this made him pause. ‘So you take all metal off the animal.’

  ‘’Course. Stops it getting caught up in the machine. You open the doors and slam the pig in like it was a pizza. When it’s done it’s just ash. Takes a bit of sweeping out. But I make sure it’s cleaned every week.’

  Matt started to nod, picturing a pile of ashes with two pre-removed golden teeth in a jar alongside it. Spider sense, tingling.

  Right. It really was time to call Miller.

  Dale was about to say something else when there was a sudden commotion from outside. The protesters were getting excited about something.

  ‘Bloody students.’ Dale jogged out and Matt followed him, glancing back for one more look at the incinerator.

  Slam them in like a pizza.

  He thought of someone trying to stuff Tabitha Clarke or Nicola Knox in there. Alive or otherwise. But he could see that it was just too small for a human body to naturally fit.

  That fact did not put him at ease. Bodies could be made to fit. And didn’t have to go in as one piece.

  By the time he got out, Dale was already down at the gate as a white van tried to push through the protesters. He felt a jolt of tension that this was Seth coming back. It wasn’t.

  ‘That’s my pig feed, you dopes. Let ’em through!’ Dale shouted. ‘Pigs gotta eat, too, you know.’

  Eventually, the protesters let the van past. On the side, it said Brolin’s Farm Supplies; a grumpy-looking woman with a grey ponytail was sitting behind the wheel rolling her eyes at the delay.

  ‘Hope you catch Seth,’ Dale said, and waved. ‘Like I said, try him at home.’

  ‘Thanks for letting me look around.’

  ‘No probs. Just tell those lot that we’re running a decent farm here. And tell everyone else who ever asks you. See ya.’

  Dale stood in front of the van and swung his hands towards the pig barn, like he was guiding a 747 along the runway. Matt headed in the opposite direction, straight for the protesters.

  ‘You probably didn’t see much in there today.’ The guy with the ginger/brown hair combo came trotting over. ‘They clean their act up a bit when they know we’re here.’

  ‘So who’s in charge of these protests?’

  He scratched the end of his nose. ‘We’re not into hierarchy.’

  ‘It’s you, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well … I co-ordinate the campaign.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Paul Mears.’

  ‘Can I have a private word, Paul?’ They wandered along the dirt road, away from the farm, until they were out of earshot. He checked his watch and was shocked to see how the day was vanishing. It was just after 7 p.m. ‘What’s your strategy to bring the farm down?’ Matt said. ‘What’s the plan?’

  ‘We’re raising awareness locally. We’re lobbying for the right inspections but, like I say, these toads are good at putting on a front when it matters.’

  Matt pressed the tip of his shoe into a ridge of dry mud, and it crumbled away. ‘How are you gathering the actual evidence of cruelty?’

  ‘I’d rather not say. But we’re building it up and are going to go public with it in the next few weeks.’

  ‘Paul.’ Matt held his gaze for a moment. ‘I know about the webcams.’

  He visibly gulped and looked back over his shoulder at the others. When he turned back he spoke in a sharp little whisper. ‘How the heck do you know about those?’

  ‘I just had a wander round and I spotted them.’

  Paul threw up his hands and shook his head. ‘Bloody amateurs. They’re supposed to be covered up.’

  ‘Don’t worry. They’re well hidden. Most people wouldn’t notice them but I’m a bit anal like that.’

  Paul shrugged. ‘So, okay. We’ve got cameras.’

  ‘And is the feed working on them alright?’

  He nodded. ‘Like I say, we’re building a case. Slowly. But it takes time.’

  ‘Are you storing what they record?’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘Then I’d like to see those camera feeds.’

  Paul swallowed. ‘What do the police want with our cameras? Do your people finally believe in the Helston Horror?’

  Matt wriggled his nose. A sour breeze had swept across the field. ‘You could say that.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Seth could feel hay digging into him as he sat on the pile of bales. It clawed into the bare skin on his back where his shirt had pulled out and ridden up. It always did that when he came up here. He’d reach to push up the hatch and nine times out of ten his shirt would stretch and pop from his jeans. He didn’t feel like tucking himself back in.

  He liked the hayloft.

  It was a good place to reflect and God seemed to speak louder in
here. It was private and out of the way, especially when he pulled the ladder up behind him. But it was still in spitting distance of the pigs. If there was an issue, like if one of them puked or tried to copulate with the electric fence, he could rattle down the ladder and sort them out. For the most part, though, he could sit and pray and watch the fields through the grimy windows.

  But there were other sights to see out there today. He leant back a little, just to make sure he wasn’t in a shaft of light, and watched the protesters. It was the end of their day and they were packing up their banners, flinging the dregs of their expensive-looking flasks into the mud.

  Professor Matt Hunter stood off to the side, talking with one of them. He’d been wandering around the farm just a few moments ago. Looking at the animals. Now he was ducking into his car while one of the protesters got into theirs. The rest of them clambered into a white van, which to Seth looked far too clean. And when the car and van pulled away, Matt’s car followed.

  Good old dependable Dale was down there shifting the pig feed. Heaving lips together and puffing out his thick heart-disease cheeks. Seth felt guilty about not helping. But there were other things now. Bigger issues crowding all possible light out. Like when Neil Armstrong stood on the moon, blotting the earth out with his thumb. It felt like that.

  He shifted himself around and the Bible on his lap almost slipped off. He grabbed it with his left hand, tearing one of the tissue-thin pages.

  ‘Dammit! Bloody!’

  He stilled himself for a moment, caught his breath, then read the story of Jesus’s crucifixion one more time.

  At his feet, Tabitha Clarke’s painting lay flat. He’d folded the bedsheet it was wrapped in, so that he could see it fully. It showed a large lady with huge quaking breasts that insisted on going their separate ways. The curl of a tree branch was coiled around her ankle, helter-skeltering up her legs, vanishing into her crotch. She had her eyes closed, and above her a storm cloud was gathering.

  The picture made him consider something he hadn’t ever before. Was Eve screwing the serpent, even before she bit the apple? Is that why she was so eager to please him and do what he asked?