by M. T Hill
‘I dunno,’ Sharon says. ‘I didn’t hear a thing. But we reckon Greenley was last to use it. I fell asleep in my chair watching you-know-who, and Greenley was in the lab – he didn’t come to bed last night. Guess he could’ve had it running overtime in the small hours.’
Rolly looks at her, then at Sharon’s shed.
‘Unsupervised, though?’ Martha shakes her head. ‘Doubt it.’
Sharon shrugs. ‘Maybe he forgot to shut it down. Got a lot on his mind. Could be that simple.’
Rolly shakes his head. ‘Except it’s not. Fuse board would pack in well before a fire started. Plus we’d get an alarm. This – it’s like someone turned it on, opened the manipulator, then fucking blowtorched it.’
Martha frowns. It doesn’t square. ‘What about lightning? Weather’s been grim enough.’
Sharon and Rolly glance at each other. Again that peculiar knowing look between them.
‘Thing is,’ Sharon says, ‘the manipulator’s really only half the puzzle. Go have a look at the head unit as well. Shit, man – Greenley’ll go spare when he sees all this.’
Martha frowns and swings under the hand’s main jib. Its hydraulic ram is bitterly cold on her hand. Over the other side, she places one foot in the maintenance port in case she needs to stub the emergency cut-out. She peers in at the head unit. There are three screws missing from its protective faceplate, the powder coating scratched off around the holes.
‘You didn’t do this either?’
Sharon nods. ‘Found it exactly this way.’
‘I wouldn’t even know where to start,’ Rolly says.
‘I don’t get it,’ Martha says. Clearer now, though, are the facts: someone has tampered with this hand.
‘Us neither,’ Rolly says.
‘Checked for BIOS tweaks, just in case?’
Rolly nods.
‘Nothing?’
‘Fuck-all. Not since the last shutdown cycle. All the code’s bang-on. No loads or queries. Definitely isn’t a virus, if that’s what you’re driving at.’
‘We found it this way,’ Sharon says. ‘I told you.’
‘Well, what about the other hands?’ Martha asks. ‘What about mine?’
‘All good,’ Sharon says. ‘Faceplates are spotless, anyway. They’re still asleep.’
‘Okay,’ Martha says. She rubs the three empty screw holes in the faceplate. ‘So whoever did this was rumbled before they could get inside.’ She looks towards Sharon’s shed. ‘Stuff like this is why we need cams up, I swear. Bad enough we’ve got bloody foxes roaming about.’
‘Foxes?’ Sharon says swiftly. ‘Nah…’
Martha climbs down and crosses to the closest limb-tree. Lifts the tarp and looks underneath. Nothing out of the ordinary, except of course for the prostheses growing down there. Six rows of fresh tibia, strands of pseudo-flesh creeping up them like rhizomes from growtrays beneath. Pigment swatches sticky-taped to their nutrient lines.
Next, she goes to her own hand. She boots the terminal in maintenance mode; checks and double-checks the anti-tamper code is still firing. Noticing the others’ silence, she turns back to them.
‘What?’
Sharon’s staring at her. ‘Martha…’ she starts.
‘Don’t even think about accusing me.’
‘It’s been a rough couple of days. And it’s pretty obvious you’re mad at Greenley. All your sloping about. The snide digs.’
Martha’s chest tightens. ‘Seriously? You think—’
‘Don’t do this, Shaz,’ Rolly interrupts. The first time
Martha’s ever heard him call her that. ‘Obviously isn’t her, is it?’
Sharon spins to him, angrier still: ‘Why does she get to wriggle out of it? ’Cause she’s a kid?’
Rolly takes Sharon’s wrist, squeezes. ‘Babe.’
Martha doesn’t say anything. Shaz. Trying not to flinch. Babe. Trying not to blink.
‘Hang about,’ Rolly says. ‘Look up there.’
Rolly points up the scarp behind the allotments, where swathes of naked peat render the moorland a black lake.
‘Christ,’ Sharon says. ‘What’s he playing at?’
Martha takes a step away from the pair of them, sensing the dynamic shift. Then Rolly has two fingers in his mouth, blowing, and the peal of his whistle resounds through the valley.
‘Greenley!’
A tiny figure on the hill turns towards them. It begins waving broadly with both arms, then beckoning with great paddling motions over one shoulder.
‘What’s the matter?’ Sharon yells.
The figure points to the contrail in the sky, before holding a set of binoculars to one side.
‘He’s fucking lost it,’ Rolly says.
‘I’ll go,’ Martha says. Something about this is nagging at her. Everything’s nagging at her.
Rolly doesn’t protest. ‘You better roll another spliff,’ Sharon says to him. ‘I can’t hack this morning. And while he’s fannying about up there, I’ll go see if that other bastard’s in a better state.’ She looks at Martha. ‘I’m sorry love,’ she says. ‘You didn’t deserve me this morning.’
Martha can’t tell if she means it.
* * *
Martha returns to the campervan, mud sloughing off her boots. Confusion like slow worms inside her, and her head throbbing. The air still burnt. Why hadn’t she noticed a difference in Sharon and Rolly’s interactions before today? She wonders if the injured man’s arrival has made her look more closely at everything. She wonders what else she’s missed.
At the campervan door, Martha looks up the scarp. Greenley’s still there, facing the distending contrail, with what must be a mobile phone to one ear. Presumably he’s found signal on higher ground. She shouts, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ But Greenley doesn’t respond.
Martha sits on the van’s side-door sill and methodically unlaces her boots, cold fingers sore on the lace hooks. She slips one foot up into the van, heel freezing against her upper thigh, and drops the boot to the ground. She sniffs, starts on the other. But she doesn’t stand up. There’s a perfectly formed footprint in the mud next to her boots. She looks at her own feet, her baggy wool socks. Without thinking, she places one in the mud and pulls it away. The shape is indistinct, much too small to match. She slips off the sock, wipes her foot, and stands up inside the van. No question: the print was left there by a bare human foot. She can see the ball, and the arch, and even the impression of an ankle in the wet mound beside it. She leans out of the campervan, struck by the chilly sensation of being watched. There’s another print, just a little further round the side of the van. Same size as the first, if less defined. And then a third, perhaps half a metre beyond the second.
She pulls on her boots and steps down, careful not to disturb the mud. A fourth, fifth and sixth print. All made by the very same foot, going by the direction of the toes, the taper of the arch. And now she’s at the corner of the campervan, and she’s kneeling to the ground against the rear wing, and there’s a smudge of mud on the light cluster. It’s a partial handprint.
She coughs. She swears. First the damaged hand, and now this. The mud is uneven and her footing less than steady. Two more footprints leading her behind the van. A second handprint, even clearer, three fingers and the heel of the palm, below the van’s rear windscreen. It’s obvious, now, that someone was leaning against the van. They’d leaned with their hand on the van, to try and see inside.
She says this to herself.
To try and see inside.
Martha wipes her nose, unsure what to do. It’s then she notices another set of prints debossed in the slop by the footprints. She squats. They are small and vaguely hexagonal. She touches one. Two tracks, running in parallel. Pawprints. She follows them: they came from the direction of the forest.
Martha stands up. Her ears are buzzing. A taste of blood in her mouth. Now she’s certain. All this really has been too neat.
* * *
‘It can’t have been him,
’ Sharon insists, holding Martha back from shaking the injured man awake. The shed is humid, the windows wet. The injured man snores loudly. ‘You seen the bloody state of him? He’s comatose.’
Martha pulls the blanket from the injured man’s legs. She examines the soles of his feet, alternating between the woven, uniform skin of the prosthesis and the wrinkled skin of his real foot. Looking under the nails, along the gunnels of the nail beds and into the cracks of his heel. Looking for mud, grass, crumbs of soil. Evidence.
‘Go look at the prints,’ Martha urges. ‘Go and see! He was bloody hopping around me while I slept!’
Sharon sighs, massaging her forehead. She lets go of Martha’s arms.
‘Listen,’ Sharon says, ‘he’s that jacked up on opiates it’s a wonder he’s still breathing at all. I was getting up every few hours to check on him, drain his catheter bag. He’s gone nowhere.’
‘You aren’t listening,’ Martha says, jabbing towards the injured man with one finger. ‘If it wasn’t him, then who? Rolly? What’s Rolly gonna do that for? You seen him after he’s smoked his bedtime jay? Think he can walk in straight lines, let alone hop? You think it can’t have been him pissing about with Greenley’s hand as well?’
Sharon looks away.
‘Fine,’ Martha says. ‘Since we’re all playing the blame game today – was it you?’
‘Jesus, Martha. I was in here with the guy all night.’
‘So it’s Greenley, then?’
Sharon frowns. She glances at the injured man. ‘I doubt it. Don’t you?’
‘Obviously,’ Martha says. ‘Because if he wanted to perv on me he could come down with his spare keys and open the door.’
Sharon looks close to tears. Strung out, pallid. ‘Stop now,’ she says. ‘I’ll – we’ll talk about this, okay? We’ll show the boys these prints, the hand. We can suss all this out. We can take photos and call Perrin back—’
Someone trudges past the shed. Sharon rubs condensation from the window. Rolly’s out there, tilting his head.
‘He’s here,’ Sharon says to Martha. ‘Greenley’s come down.’
So Martha marches straight out of the shed.
* * *
‘I think a plane went down,’ Greenley tells Martha and Rolly, slightly manic. His lips look raw and his eyes are bloodshot. He’s pointing at what’s left of the contrail above. ‘A small one. Definitely went down. See the dispersal? It’s smoke. Can’t you smell it? There’s stuff all over my roof. It came right bloody over us. Something came right over and went down, I swear it. I think it landed way out on Wracklow, though the cloud’s too low to be sure. Tried calling it in, but even my bloody proxy network’s in and out. I went looking for blue lights, helicopter lights. I looked for flares. Something came right over and went down…’
Rolly comes forward and touches Greenley’s arm. ‘Chill, boss. Here.’ He sits Greenley down on the frame of a manure box. Rolly gives Greenley a pill of some kind, pulled from a cargo pocket.
Martha looks up at the clouds. Heavy iron slung from one verge to another. The smoke, if it was smoke, is all but gone.
‘Shouldn’t we go out there?’ Rolly asks. ‘Properly, I mean. Get some kit on and check it out.’
Greenley nods, excitable suddenly, as if he hadn’t imagined they could do that.
Rolly looks at Martha, and then at Sharon’s shed.
‘What about him?’ Martha says, meaning the injured man. ‘We can’t leave him alone. He can’t be trusted. Maybe you should stay as well, Rolly. Or better yet, take him to a hospital. Get him out of here.’
‘No,’ Greenley says flatly. ‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘Greenley’s right,’ Rolly says. ‘He’s still in pain. Better he sleeps it off.’
‘More convenient, you mean.’
Rolly scowls, the corners of his lower lip trembling slightly. ‘Jesus, kid. What’s got on your tits today?’
Martha gives him the finger and turns to Greenley. ‘Last night,’ she tells him, trying to hold the anger back, ‘someone tried to hack one of the hands. And then they came sharking me in the camper while I was sleeping.’
‘You’re kidding,’ Greenley says.
‘Obviously I’m not.’
‘Who?’
Martha points to Sharon’s shed. ‘Him. In there. There were single footprints in the mud – go and look. He hopped down to me. I’m telling you now.’
Rolly laughs at the idea, but Greenley at least seems to weigh it. He knocks back Rolly’s pill, and his Adam’s apple moves up, hangs, as if it’s hard to swallow it. Thinking, thinking. Deciding. Then his mania resolves to focus – even his features seem sharper somehow. If he’s surprised by Martha’s allegation, he doesn’t show it. He says, ‘Rolly, Martha’s right. You should stay on site with Sharon. Phones are still out, but there’s a hard line to Abbas and Perrin in the lab. The red handset. Anything happens – anything at all – you hit eight-eight-eight. Tell them you’re with me. We’ll all need to talk again later. And Martha, I want you to lie low as well.’
‘No chance,’ Martha says, shaking her head. ‘I’m coming with you.’
Greenley hesitates, then relents. ‘Fine. We’ll have to take the camper. You’ll need your waterproofs.’
‘Aren’t you going to check out the footprints?’ Martha asks.
Greenley avoids eye contact. ‘Please go and get ready,’ he says. And it isn’t a request.
10
Wracklow, the given name of the moorland well beyond Dillock, is a near-featureless expanse, with gradations of purple heather between ramps of naked peat. Despite its remote feel, however, it isn’t hard to get there: a fifteen-minute drive along a serpentine road, stony quiet but for Greenley’s deep breathing and the camper’s old turbo-diesel knocking away.
As they climb into low cloud, past sad memorials for dead bikers fixed into wet stone walls, Martha withdraws from the silence by reflecting on her links with the place. There are tales about these moors – a torso found in a suitcase in a layby, small bodies in shallow graves, unexplained light phenomena (something do with harried land and rocky outcrops, which some locals claim as ghosts). But Martha also keeps her own private stash of stories, more intimate to her than local legends or myths.
Martha’s last foster home before she turned sixteen lay on the far boundary of these moors. From there, clear views over Sheffield made ideal surrounds for lazy days or late evenings spent in boys’ cars on quiet lanes, or sometimes at the trig station on Lathe Head, the region’s highest point. Martha never said much during these encounters, though not through shyness. She never liked the smell of spark – especially not the taste it left in boys’ mouths – but by day she loved the views, which justified the trade. At night she was electrified when the headlights went off to reveal a teeming city.
One boy she used to see, a local lad with a perfectly symmetrical face, admitted to her that his older brother had once been dragged up on to Wracklow by a local hardcase and battered with a golf putter, left in the gorse. Crawling towards headlights on a distant road, the boy’s brother came across the wreckage of an enormous plane, which had crashed there not long after the Second World War. It was an American B-29 Superfortress named Blown Highlights – so-called because it was part of the reconnaissance group that photographed the Hiroshima bombing. It’d flown out of Lincolnshire on a training flight to Burtonwood, close to Warrington. The crew, contending with heavy weather, began their descent too early, apparently without realising they hadn’t cleared the uplands. All thirteen on board were killed. Their bodies were removed and, recovery being too difficult owing to the terrain, the wreckage was left in place as a memorial.
Martha found this boy’s story alarming. Not because of its violence, but because she knew her then-foster parents collected war artefacts, and often said they’d moved east of Manchester to be closer to these moors, so they could visit the wreck and others like it. She told the boy this, and he stared at her, spark-droned and unabl
e to process the link.
Now, in Greenley’s camper, Martha remembers that boy’s face, the long lashes and thin lips and concave chest, and tries to picture a plane wreck left up there for all this time, slowly being reclaimed by the earth. The isolation, the quiet grief of it. All those families the aircrew left behind. Are there pilgrimages, unmentioned anniversaries? Are there still tears? To Martha, it’s strange to think that almost a century later, people might still go and squirrel tiny pieces of the wreck into their pockets – nuts, bolts, other fixings. How many people round here have pieces of old plane hidden somewhere in their house?
* * *
Soon the camper reaches a natural plateau in the road, where the edges have been tarmacked and gravelled. What was a grey mist from afar is now a squall that soaks their waterproofs to capacity within minutes. Zero visibility, too – no Manchester visible in the basin behind – and before them hangs a heavy shroud, underlit in places by an orange glow, which intensifies as they navigate the banks of peat, heather and hardy brown grass. When she turns, the campervan has vanished. The twisting shape of the road is described only by the cars traversing it.
‘Up ahead,’ Greenley comments. Martha tucks in behind him. The smell she’d noticed that morning is less ambient – and getting stronger. Another few minutes, and the cloud has fully enveloped them. They leave the path and cut into the moor proper. The rain and wind are immediately harsher without the banks shielding the path. Civilisation drops back. It’s hard to hear, not that they speak. Their only markers for a while are white canvas ton-bags full of geotextiles, dropped here by drone to help re-cover the peat. At a distance, they resemble white stone blocks; up close, they are invasive, perversely out of place.
‘That way,’ Greenley says, motioning to a set of shelves. Martha doesn’t need telling: the cloud above the feature is pulsing orange.
They ascend, sweating. At the top, Greenley turns to help her. ‘My goodness,’ he says, hauling her up. ‘It’s here.’
Martha comes over the lip. A chunk of smouldering debris directly in front of her. Next to this, a clean-looking metal rib, stitched with holes. The smell is intensely chemical.