‘I don’t really know, but he chased us off with a shotgun.’
‘Aye, sounds like him.’
‘We’re just heading back there now, take another wee look.’
‘Well, be careful. He’s a law unto himself. And you wouldn’t want him to go postal on you.’
‘Will do.’
Michael had no idea what going postal meant. He was too young. But he suspected it wasn’t anything good. He cut the line. They were just coming up on their car. They couldn’t tell if Magic Martin was still inside because the windows were all smoked up. When they opened the door Magic was lying flat out, mumbling incoherently, but with a big smile on his face. ‘Don’t breathe in,’ said Michael as he climbed behind the wheel.
*
Pete sat back, clasped his hands behind his head, and said, ‘Aw.’
Alix glanced back. ‘What?’
‘The enthusiasm of youth.’
‘Michael?’
‘Michael. And Sean.’
‘They’ll grow out of it.’
‘They will. Sad, though. When I first joined here, I was seventeen. Seventeen! Seventeen. I’d never peeled a potato or kissed a girl, but I was out doing courts in my first week.’
‘Was this back when the paper was printed on parchment?’
‘Funny. Three and a half days of hard work, and then a day and a night of heavy drinking and recovery. Glorious. And speaking of which, looking forward to this thing tonight? Gerry’s team-building?’
‘Haven’t decided if I’m going,’ said Alix.
‘I think it’s compulsory.’
‘Well, that will help with the team-building.’
‘It does sound like a bit of a nightmare. But maybe a chance to get to know Rob better.’
‘Yup.’
‘Maybe a chance to tease things out of him.’
‘You mean, like, who’s his favourite? Because I’m pretty sure you’re not even in the top—’
‘I mean, like, what he’s doing here. Why he left the glorious Guardian.’
‘Maybe he just wanted out of the rat race.’
‘Leaving his wife and kids, to come here? No, there’s something deep and dark there. I tried Googling, but nothing came up. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I’ve a few feelers in with guys I know in England, see if they can come up with any gossip.’
‘You’re right,’ said Alix.
‘Right about?’
‘You shouldn’t be saying that. It’s none of your business.’
‘It absolutely is. We have to work with him.’
‘Oh, get a life, would you, Pete?’
She turned back to her computer.
Pete said, ‘No smoke without fire.’
‘There’s no fucking smoke!’
‘Maybe you just don’t want to see it.’
‘Maybe you could just try shutting your cake-hole for a while.’
‘Lovely. You’re such a lady.’
A silence descended.
After a while Pete said, ‘You just watch this space.’
Alix just kept typing.
★
Now that they had a good idea of the lie of the land, Michael and Sean tried to get a more specific idea from Magic Martin as to where he’d found his skull. But Magic was pretty much out of it, so they decided to release him back into the wild. Then they drove out to the farm and got their first proper view of it from the road – it was, as Pete had described, a real eyesore, with abandoned and rusting cars littering the approach to a large but equally dilapidated-looking farmhouse, with various barns and out-houses in similar disrepair visible beyond. Sean took some photos, then they drove back to the rubbish-strewn field and parked in the shelter of some overhanging trees about a hundred metres from the open gates, but on an incline that gave them a view of the trees from which Farmer Galvin had emerged to chase them off.
There was no sign of him now.
Michael told Sean to stay in the car and keep an eye on the trees, and the farm itself; if he saw any movement he was to flash his lights and Michael would flee. Sean would have preferred to join in the hunt, but he could see the wisdom of Michael’s plan. He told his colleague, his friend, to be careful.
‘This time he’ll probably shoot first and ask questions later,’ he warned. ‘Or Trespassers will be executed.’
‘Thanks for that,’ said Michael.
He got out of the car, still damp and green-kneed from his earlier retreat, and hurried towards the open gates. This time he picked his way cautiously down the incline, seeking out footholds and testing them before giving his full trust and weight, and made it to the bottom without further mishap. Then he began a careful, inch by inch, examination of the dump; he mostly used his feet to turn items over, to upend bin bags, to shift sheets of corrugated metal; after ten minutes the only item of interest he had discovered was a rat that scurried away as quickly as he himself scurried backwards. He – Michael – was pleased that Sean was secure in the car and therefore out of range of hearing the yelp he let out as he confronted the creature. It was at least a foot long. And would grow bigger in the telling.
Michael was just moving to a different part of the dump, closer to the trees, when he became aware of a beeping sound, and then a mechanical rumble. He had been facing away from the road, but now that he looked up, the first thing he saw was Sean flashing the lights, and then his attention was diverted to the open gates and the lorry just reversing into them. It stopped, and the metal bin on the back began to tilt up. He could see bricks and soil and rubble – and then as the angle increased it all began to tumble out and cascade down the hill towards him, an avalanche cloaked in dust.
Michael stumbled backwards, tripped over an old tyre, and then bounced back to his feet just as he was enveloped in the cloud. Something heavy cracked into the back of his legs but he managed to stay upright and kept moving away until he found refuge behind some sturdy-looking bushes. The bin finally emptied and its load began to settle at the foot of the incline. As the cloud dissipated, Michael peered up at the lorry, and saw that the driver had climbed out and was now talking to Farmer Galvin, who was still in his yellow windcheater, and still armed and dangerous. The driver climbed back into his cab and Galvin began to shut the gates. When he had bolted them he walked away along the inside of the hedge alongside the road; before he got as far as Sean’s car the incline had decreased enough for him to slip down the bank and continue across the grass towards the trees and the path leading to his farmhouse. Michael waited until he had disappeared inside before he ventured out from behind the bush. He began to smack at his trousers and jacket, trying to get the dust off while studying the bricks and masonry and branches and mud that had just been tipped. He looked back up at the gate – the fact that it was now closed and locked suggested that it had been left open because Galvin was expecting the truck, which meant that at the very least the farmer was running an illegal dump, no doubt undercutting whatever rate the local council was charging. It was, he supposed, a story, if not particularly earth-shattering.
‘You all right, mate?’
It was Sean, his head just visible over the hedge.
‘Sure. I’m super. I look like a bloody zombie!’
‘It suits you,’ said Sean.
Michael was dirty and damp, and disappointed, and embarrassed. And he would have been quite happy to be any of those things if he had gotten something out of it, but there was no making a silk purse out of this sow’s ear; he had come in search of a human skull and a major news story, but that dream had literally turned to dust; all he had discovered was some pretty minor fly-tipping. That was the reality of a small-town paper. He could very easily get stuck there, for ever. But at least he had a ticket out. A memory came to him, standing there in the rain and the wind, with his nostrils filled with masonry dust and his trousers sticking to him, of watching an old movie with his mum, a movie he had loved yet found incredibly sad. She had had to persuade him to watch it because it was in black an
d white, and he never, ever watched them, they were from the Dark Ages, but she had persisted and because it was Christmas he’d given in and sat through It’s a Wonderful Life and what had really struck home with him had been the main character – George Bailey? – and the way his plan to see the world was endlessly frustrated by the dull realities of small-town life. It had all worked out for poor sappy George in the end – but only after years and years and years of stultifying frustration. Michael couldn’t wait for years. He would go to Newcastle. He would graduate and work for a daily paper, become a foreign correspondent, see the world, or maybe go into television, radio, there were a million...
‘Michael?’
‘What?’
‘What the fuck is that?’
Sean was leaning on the gate now and pointing towards the top of the landslide of rubble. Michael’s brow furrowed as he zoomed in on where Sean was indicating; but he was looking at whatever it was from a different angle and couldn’t quite make it out; something wiry and pointed.
‘Michael...’
Sean was over the fence now, and cautiously approaching the summit of the rubbish. Michael, already in a mess, negotiated his way up the hill slightly faster, so that they converged on the object at just about the same time.
They both looked down at it.
It was, without doubt, even caked with soil, the skeletal frame of a human hand.
Michael said, ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but last time I checked, sheep don’t have hands.’
‘Holy shit.’
‘Bingo,’ said Michael.
*
As Sean took his photos, he said, ‘Shouldn’t we be calling the—?’
‘Yep,’ said Michael. ‘But not yet.’
He looked about him, found an old blue plastic crate, upended it and then placed it over the hand to protect it from any disturbance.
He wiped off his own hands and said, ‘Okay – if we move fast enough, we’ll still be able to catch it.’
‘It?’
‘The lorry, Sean – the lorry. C’mon...’
Michael climbed onto the top of the gate, jumped down and hurried towards the car. Sean scrambled to catch up. As he drew level he said, ‘Are you sure about this? Isn’t it like a murder scene or something? What if we leave it and the farmer comes and moves—’
‘It’s not a murder scene.’
‘How can you possibly know...?’
‘Well, I don’t – I’m guessing. Look – if Magic found a skull at dawn this morning, then it was probably dumped there just like the hand was, but sometime yesterday. The hand looks ancient, so even if it is a murder it was probably years ago. Common sense says the skull and the hand are connected and must come from the same site, and probably dumped in the landfill by the same truck or at least the same company. So, if we can follow the truck back to wherever it’s come from, we’ll have a much better idea of what’s going on.’
They reached the car. Sean opened the driver’s side door, but then paused before he clicked the lock on the passenger side. He looked across the top of the car at Michael and said, ‘Gee whizz, Sherlock, you’ve got it all worked out.’ Michael smiled back. ‘Or you’re talking a pile of shite and giving the farmer time to hide the evidence.’
Michael nodded. ‘There’s always that possibility.’
There wasn’t much traffic to slow them down, but the same would be true of the lorry. It had maybe a five-minute start. Neither of them remembered any logos on it because they’d been concentrating on the actual dumping, but now as Sean drove he handed his camera to Michael and told him to scroll back through his pictures to see if there were any identifying marks. Sean had taken a lot of photos, but all necessarily from one angle: there was nothing on that side to indicate the lorry’s origins; however, he had captured the licence plate. If they’d been cops they could have run the plates there and then – but they were able to access the next best thing, Pete, who knew everyone and had connections everywhere. Michael called it in. Pete asked for an explanation. Michael said, later. He didn’t want to run the risk of Pete or more probably Rob telling him to report their discovery to the police immediately. He wanted to get the story first. He needed to get the story first.
‘There!’
They were barely onto the ring road and there it was – labouring along at just under the speed limit, like a pensioner with cataracts. Michael fell in just a couple of cars back. When he glanced across, Sean was smiling at him. Michael smiled back, no words required. Another mile further along and the lorry turned off onto Millbank Road. Another few hundred metres and it arrived at a building site next to St Patrick’s Church. According to the billboard that towered above the site, a shopping centre with luxury apartments was under construction with a completion date the following year. They couldn’t quite tell how far advanced the building was because there was a wooden fence at least six foot tall surrounding the site.
Sean drummed his fingers on the steering wheel for a few seconds, then indicated and pulled across traffic into a car park in the grounds of St Patrick’s. Millbank Road had a steadily rising gradient; with the church being slightly further up that road it meant that anyone standing in its grounds could, from a certain position, get a clear view over the fence surrounding the building site. Sean parked at the highest point and they both got out. They peered over the dry-stone wall that was the boundary of the church grounds and across the building site, which was basically a large muddy field with one small part dug out with trenches and pegged with wooden stakes, while closer to the wall there were diggers excavating and then dropping their loads into the back of a lorry, which, as they watched, was joined by the one they had just followed.
Sean took more photos. Michael turned and studied the church behind them. It was a former monastery that, more than a thousand years before, had served as a university, one of the largest in Europe, until repeated sackings by marauding Vikings took their toll and it gradually faded from significance. They had both attended events here in the course of their work. Funerals, charity auctions, gigs by visiting bands taking advantage of the church’s ancient and marvellous acoustics. There was a brand-new hall behind the church in which Michael had recently endured a badly produced, poorly acted and over-long pantomime. He said as much in his review, and had then received at least a dozen calls from irate parents calling him every name under the sun. One furious mother had actually threatened to arrange to have his legs broken. Rob had allowed the review to appear in the paper as a lesson to him in small-town journalism – don’t apply West End standards to amateur productions. ‘We’re here to celebrate their endeavours,’ he’d said, ‘not to tear them apart. It’s not a news story, so look for the positive. Every time you mention that Jimmy did this or Katie did that, the parents rush out and buy multiple copies of the paper for all their relations. That works for us financially, plus the parents feel good about the paper and hopefully go out and buy one next week as well.’ The minister, who had written the pantomime, and directed it, was particularly vitriolic in his attack on the paper in general and Michael in particular. And now he was standing behind them, asking what they were doing on church property.
Michael said, ‘Reverend Erskine, I hope you don’t mind but—’
‘I do mind. This is private property. And particularly where you are concerned, Michael Foster.’
‘Ah,’ said Michael.
‘Yes, indeed.’
‘Sorry about that – got a bit carried away.’
‘Yes, you did. Apparently I can’t direct traffic.’
‘It was supposed to be a funny...’
‘Not many of us were laughing.’
It was on the tip of his tongue to say, ‘A bit like the panto...’ But he held it and tried to change the subject. ‘We just wanted a closer look at what they’re building.’
‘I’d rather you asked permission.’
‘We didn’t see anyone around,’ said Sean. ‘Oh – and I should drop round those pics of Puss’n�
��Boots – didn’t they look great in the paper?’
Rev Erskine hesitated before giving the young photographer a begrudging nod. With that he seemed to soften a little; he shook his head at Michael and stepped up beside them. He gazed out across the building site. ‘They’ll be at it for a year yet,’ he said, ‘so what’s so interesting?’
‘Well, some drug-addled—’ Sean began, before Michael cut him off with, ‘There’s some issue with fly-tipping. May be nothing.’
‘Well – they’re a big enough company, I don’t see why they’d be indulging in that kind of nonsense.’
‘You have many dealings with them, Reverend Erskine?’ Michael asked.
‘Well, initially, yes, of course. There was some haggling, but since the deal went through, I’d say we’ve gotten along famously.’
‘Deal? How do you mean exactly?’
The minister’s brow furrowed. ‘Do you never read your own paper?’ Before Michael could answer he carried on: ‘They bought the land from us. You covered it in quite a big way.’
‘Oh, I—’
‘How else do you think we could afford our lovely new hall? And a community centre to come. It’s been a real windfall for us. You do know all about the new hall, don’t you?’
‘Well, yes, I—’
‘You know, the hall where that calamitous, poorly directed hodgepodge of stale jokes was only recently presented?’
‘Oh that new hall. Right enough.’
‘Now – if you don’t mind?’
Rev Erskine nodded across the car park towards the gates. Clearly he hadn’t softened that much.
‘Do you mind if I just get a few more pics?’ Sean asked.
‘I do, actually,’ the minister replied stiffly. ‘And next time, call our press office. I’m sure it won’t be a problem, but there’s a right way to do things.’ He raised an impatient eyebrow.
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