The Great Darkness

by Jim Kelly

  A few sheep had their ears cut off to produce blood smears on microscope slides, but most were simply cut open on a rock beneath a convenient waterfall.

  Three hooded figures gathered round as each was eviscerated, the gas masks turning to each other as some kind of animated conversation took place.

  The carcasses and entrails were burnt on site in an incinerator on the beach, the men’s suits and masks stuffed into hot chemical disinfectors set up along the stony shore.

  One final twist made Brooke look away.

  ‘It is of interest to further examine the physiology of those sheep which survive the test.’

  A hooded man caressed a sheep before producing a small pistol, pressing it to the side of the head. The inaudible shot produced a spasm, and then a second later, the animal flopped.

  ‘The results indicate that the Hoay expedition was a success,’ said the announcer, his voice rising to signal a sense of peroration. ‘The agent can be delivered and is effective. Further research is now needed to see if the death rate can be maintained when the target population comprises large, complex mammals. Initial research at institute level will proceed on horses. Operation Pegasus is already in its initial stages.’

  Six men, exhilarated at being freed from their protective suits and masks, were shown standing round a fire, drinking tea. One of them had put on a woollen hat, and he lifted it now, as if in celebration of a victory.

  The film closed with Porton Down’s insignia, and – briefly – a fluttering Union flag. Then it spooled off the projector. The light became a beacon on the square of white paper, and Brooke recalled the shots he’d heard from St John’s Wilderness on the night of the Great Darkness and had dismissed as the sound of poachers. Then he saw again the men, straining to pull the empty carts.

  ‘Horses,’ he said out loud.

  They’d infected horses as part of the anthrax experiments. Some had died, others had shown no symptoms, but they couldn’t take chances. They’d buried the slaughtered horses in the pits, and then shot the others who’d hauled the carts.

  The film had left him with a sense of powerless despair. But what got him to his feet was an idea, a terrible idea, as deadly as the anthrax seed. And this idea sprang forth fully formed from the back of an empty lorry parked on Castle Hill.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  The city, when they saw it laid beneath them from the edge of the high moor, seemed to shimmer with fire, sparks rising from flights of chimneys, the sudden glare of furnaces glimpsed along a snaking valley. The hellish lights played on a low ceiling of sooty cloud. Brooke thought what an inadequate word city was, in that it had to embrace the liquid reflections of the Cam on medieval stone, and this – the city of Sheffield – a flickering crucible of brick and steel.

  Edison, at the wheel of the Wasp, peered at the scene as the road slid downhill, telling Brooke that he had relatives in Leeds and they said that the only time anyone in Sheffield had seen a clear sky in living memory had been during the General Strike. The place was a byword for miasmas of sulphur and pitch, for canyons of windowless brick and sudden glimpses of distant high moors.

  By a series of plummeting turns, they descended into the city. Brooke noted what must be the city hall, a tall Florentine tower wreathed in dirty smog. A fine neo-Classical concert hall faced a brightly lit department store; a fountain in white stone depicting a dolphin shot a plume of water skywards. Trams slid by, clanking on iron rails.

  West Bar, home to the city’s police headquarters, lay in a trough leading down to a canal which glowed with a luminous orange light. Behind the station building, a yard ran up to a stone cliff, down which water ran in intermittent waterfalls. Cambridge, thought Brooke, floated on the fen-edge, whereas this place felt as if it had been hewn from the rocks.

  Detective Inspector Solly appeared, armed with a map and a torch, directing Edison to take the Wasp to the tail end of a convoy of eight unmarked vehicles, which included two large black vans and a lorry.

  ‘Mob handed,’ said Solly, smiling, getting in the back. ‘They’ll have flown, mind. We were gonna get a man on the inside like I said, Brooke, to find out who’s at the top. Too late now. Can’t keep anything secret now, can we? Still, you’ve called foul, Brooke. This is down to you. Let’s hope you’re right. If you are, there’ll be fireworks … You say this meat’s infected?’

  Brooke half-turned in the passenger seat.

  ‘Just the horses,’ said Brooke. ‘There were carcasses to bury, and the soldiers had to do the work. Currie had a better idea. Get the carts down to the pits, then beyond to a sandy track on the far side, load the horsemeat into a lorry, then fill in the empty pits.’

  The convoy pulled away from West Bar through half-lit streets.

  ‘On the night of the Great Darkness it all went wrong,’ said Brooke. ‘Our sharp-eyed constable stopped the convoy. Currie had to call it off. Which left one empty lorry on Castle Hill. But they’d made five earlier trips, maybe more. The meat is not for human consumption. It’s lethal.’

  A wide street swept past, then a railway station, as they drove under a great set of stone arches. Here the city’s industrial district began, miles of straight road running like an arrow between towering factory walls. When the air war began, Brooke imagined the bombers following the thin silver thread of the river to this vast metalworks. For every bomber they sent to Cambridge, they’d send a hundred here.

  They passed rows of terraced houses before the ground opened out before them into an area of derelict one-storey factory buildings, the cars bumping over iron rails, before sweeping between a pair of grand, dilapidated concrete gate posts.

  The old abattoir lay ahead. Solly told them that in the city it was always called the Meat House. Two administrative blocks in identical classical style, with mock pillars, stood on either side of the drive, which led towards a complex of low buildings, skylights catching the moonlight.

  ‘We’d smell it as kids,’ said Solly. ‘Even from the top of a bus you’d get the stink. Iron, like rust, on the wind. And the sound, of course, the lowing and the odd bellow. They know, course they know, that death’s coming, because there’s a stench of burnt bone from the saws.’

  The cars, trundling forward, cut their lights. Past the gates, they killed the engines too, rolling to a halt. To one side of the main building stood an old vehicle depot, comprising a high shed with a pitched roof and a glass canopy over the entrance, the great doors wide open.

  Brooke heard a pistol chamber being spun on the back seat.

  ‘How many guns?’ he asked.

  ‘All the inspectors, that’s six. Paperwork’s all done, Brooke. It’s no big deal in this city. They carry, we carry. Just make sure you stay behind me.’

  He leant forward and Brooke caught a whiff of beer on the detective’s breath. ‘We find anyone in that place tonight we’re takin’ them back to West Bar. If they want to travel in a bag that’s all well and good.’

  The two black vans came to a halt, open at the back, to reveal squads of uniformed constables, who were set back in reserve by a wall, night-sticks drawn.

  A chief inspector by the name of Garside was directing his forces like a traffic policeman on point duty. A rapid search of the vehicle bay revealed it to be deserted. A silent order must have been given because several of the constables began to smoke, and the whispers of the plain-clothes men grew louder.

  Solly wandered back to find Brooke and Edison standing by the Wasp. ‘Told you. They’ve pissed off. They got wind, alright. We should ’ave waited.’

  A pair of arc lamps, run from a generator in one of the police vans, lit the garage up, the oily concrete floor glistening like frost. Garside and Solly were called over to examine one of the sumps in the vehicle bay. Here, mechanics had been able to work under the lorries in a low trench, greasy and dark. The mood changed again. A doctor with a black bag was fetched from one of the waiting cars.

  Solly was back. ‘They’ve done for someone in the pit,’
he said. ‘Farewell gift for the pathologist. By what’s left of the hair I’d say it’s your missing driver, Brooke – Ginger Thorpe. Christ …’ He fumbled for his cigarettes. ‘Stink’s foul. Up close. They’ve burnt him, alright, rolled him in the oil and chucked in a match.’

  Garside marched over, his outline distinguished by the lack of a neck, scrum-wide shoulders and the whiff of peppermint.

  ‘Brooke? The Yard rang. I’m to assist, apparently. Well here I am, assisting. Looks like the lot of them have scarpered. But we’ll search the place. What are we looking for?’

  ‘Fridges. A meat store big enough to establish a market in illegal supply.’

  Garside crunched a mint between his back teeth. ‘This place closed in ’36. We’ve had a car on surveillance for a week since your first call. Nowt. Fuck all nowt. And listen to that …’

  He held a hand up to a cauliflower ear. ‘Silent as the grave. No power. The meat’ll be on counters by now. Here, Leeds, up the valley, Manchester.’

  Garside looked at his shoes. ‘Still. Thorough, that’s us. To a fault.’ He filled his lungs. ‘Where’s our man the key holder?’ he shouted at a group of detectives clustered by a radio car.

  The site, Garside explained, had been rented by a haulage company. A man in brown overalls, representing the owners, led them to a set of metal doors and, after struggling with padlocks, swung them open.

  ‘Lead on, McDuff,’ said Garside. ‘Let’s get this pantomime over with.’

  Torches played over a large room, perhaps thirty yards long, with three parallel lines of metal tables. Overhead, a pulley system had once run a railway of hooks. At the end stood three industrial lifts, the buttons listing three floors:

  GROUND

  BASEMENT

  COLD ROOMS

  They took a staircase to the basement. It ran under the whole of the ground floor factory area. Brick corridors led to a series of rooms still cluttered with tool shops, vats and finally a power room. A set of three large electric generators stood caked in dust.

  Garside left a trailing line with his finger through the grime on the metalwork. Brushing dust from a seat he perched, retrieving a hip flask which he offered to Solly after he’d taken a gulp.

  ‘Told you,’ said Solly. ‘Your meat’s gone, Brooke.’

  Brooke thought about telling them there and then what that meant: that hundreds, thousands, could die.

  But it could wait, because as he’d come down the stairs from the ground floor he’d felt it: the trace of iciness, a degree, perhaps two, but perceptible nonetheless.

  ‘I’d like to try the cold rooms,’ he said, leading the way back to the staircase.

  The lowest floor was much deeper below the basement than the basement had been below the ground. Six switchback flights emptied into a room less than ten feet square with a single locked door. The key man caught them all up and struggled with the padlock.

  Garside silently showed Brooke the dust on his hand from the banister. Underfoot, the tiled floor was gritty.

  The door opened to reveal three mobile generators, the new metal fittings gleaming in the torchlight, and beyond them a set of lift doors. Beside one, a tall metal stool had been set by the controls, a copy of the Sheffield Star on the ground beside a ceramic mug. The front-page picture showed Neville Chamberlain waving from an open car. Cigarette butts littered the ground, the crushed paper dry and white. Rats’ eyes flashed in the shadows.

  Garside filled his lungs. ‘Petrol-fired generators, to power the fridges and the lifts. Right, the fuel tank must be upstairs. So we missed that. Amongst other things.’ He turned to Solly. ‘Get the sparks down here. I want one of these working. I want lights. Now. And get the uniforms too, fast.’

  Brooke realised that the left-hand wall of the narrow room was in fact a series of metal doors, each one padlocked.

  ‘These are new,’ said the keyholder, examining the locks. ‘I’ll need the cutters.’

  Brooke put a hand on the nearest door and felt the icy cold.

  It took two electricians less than twenty minutes to start the first of the three generators. The bolt-cutters took longer, so that by the time the first padlock lay in pieces the lights were buzzing.

  Edison gave out face masks they’d brought in a satchel from Cambridge, care of Aldiss’s storeroom at the laboratory.

  Brooke put his weight down on a lever and prised the first door open, releasing trapped air with an audible hiss.

  He’d never forget the sight: this fridge, which would turn out to be the first of six, contained the unbutchered meat. To one side, whole carcasses of beef hung from hooks. But on the other, an open space had been set aside for the horses. An image flashed into his head from the Western Front, the blasted winter fields of Flanders, the stiff limbs of bloated horses crooked in the air. Frost glittered from frozen eyes.

  Edison followed him into the room, buttoning his coat to his throat.

  Kneeling, Brooke reached out a hand to the neck of a horse whose teeth caught the light as if they’d been studded with diamonds.

  ‘Right. You better tell me what I should know,’ said Garside, his voice slurred by the mask.

  Brooke took out a notebook, although he’d memorised the key facts. ‘The horses died of a lethal bacterium. One of the reasons it’s so dangerous is that it spreads by using spores – seeds, really. They are tough. They can survive low-temperature freezing.’

  He let that sink in. ‘They can’t survive fire. An incinerator would work. But beware. Human beings can catch this bug, it’s called anthrax. There’s one of three ways – skin touch, breathing in spores or eating infected meat. The one class of people most at danger are abattoir workers. You need to find the men who did this. You need to make sure they’ve just been storing the meat, that it’s not already on the market. And you need to destroy all this …’

  In the white light he could see Garside’s eyes for the first time. They narrowed now, as he tried to find a way out, an easy fix.

  Surveying the dead meat, his shoulders sagged. ‘Alright. Let’s see inside the others …’

  Fridges two and three held pork and lamb carcasses. Four held poultry. Five held split carcasses of beef. The generators must have been down only a matter of hours because nowhere did they see any signs of melting flesh. Skin shone with a crisp frost.

  It was in five that Edison called out. Walking between two lines of hooked pig carcasses, Brooke came to a halt beside his sergeant.

  Side by side with the slaughtered meat hung Jack Gretorix. His face had frozen in an ugly mask, one eye closed, the other dimly reflecting the electric light. They’d put a hook through his belt to haul him up on the pulley and then tied his hands to the line. There was no sign of any wounds, or violence. The frost had turned him, and his clothes, the same colour as the beasts on either side.

  ‘Jack,’ said Garside, as if greeting an old friend. ‘Well, that’s one less to worry about. Cut him down …’

  Brooke considered the irony of young Gretorix’s death: that he’d lived his last days in fear of the flames and the heat, the baiting of his killers, only to meet it here in the icy silence, surrounded by the glassy stares of innocent animals.

  It was Edison, again, whose keen eyes took them back to the first fridge. Leading them into the mass of stiff bodies, he pointed out two horses which they’d all overlooked; they’d been part-butchered, a leg missing on one, a flank on another, the red flesh pale and bloodless.

  ‘I saw pigs too, in the third fridge, part-butchered,’ he said. ‘Someone’s taken meat off en route. Eaten it by now,’ he said.

  Garside looked stunned, perhaps by this revelation, but possibly by the sight of the horse’s frozen guts, bowels curled neatly around pale organs.

  He put a cigarette between his lips but left it unlit. ‘If someone catches this … What are we looking for, Brooke?’

  Aldiss had given him a brief summary. It depended on the route of infection: by touch, by air, by food.

&n
bsp; ‘That’s complicated. But we need to look out for ulcers on the skin, stiff limbs, vomiting blood, nose and throat pains – swelling up, difficulty breathing. Shock: toxic shock, then death.’

  An hour later, in the car, after they’d dropped Solly off in the city centre, Brooke made the final connection. Did Edison recall Jed Sneeth, stretched out on his bed at Manor Farm, sickening, complaining that his limbs were always stiff? And Brooke’s private memory: a white china sink, splashed with drops of blood.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  Six hours later, they picked Aldiss up outside his laboratory in the heart of Cambridge. The scientist climbed aboard with a set of lab coats over his arm, a box of rubber gloves and a four-gallon carboy of a clear liquid. Edison had already collected a single A-frame sign: POLICE – KEEP OUT. A radio car, sent to Manor Farm before Brooke left Sheffield, was already at the scene, with instructions to let no one in and no one out. ‘Say it’s quarantine,’ Brooke told Carnegie-Brown by phone. ‘Don’t say anything else.’

  Leaving Cambridge at just after dawn, they followed the river north, a single skein of white mist marking its winding course through flooded water meadows. The first police checkpoint was on the edge of Horningsea, where a uniformed constable with white cuffs directed a tractor onto a back road. The village itself was still asleep, save for a farmworker trudging north by the roadside.

  At the entrance to Manor Farm they found the radio car blocking the road, and PC Cable at the farm gate.

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Cable. Anything here?’

  ‘Nearest neighbour’s there …’ He pointed across two fields to a single set of two terrace houses. ‘Farm labourers. They heard about Sneeth’s death; it’s local gossip. The wife – Elspeth – has not been seen since she identified the body. I’ve been here an hour and nothing’s moved.’

  Cable looked back down the lane to the farmhouse.