Victory Disc

by Andrew Cartmel

  I took a deep breath. The air in the tunnel was still relatively clean. The exhaust would be heavier than oxygen. It would sink most thickly to the deepest part of the sett—the big chamber. That was the lowest point. This tunnel I was in was the highest. And I was at the highest point of the tunnel.

  The air wasn’t going to get any better than this.

  I took a deep breath and braced myself. Then I pressed my bruised hands to the wood and pushed. I pushed for all I was worth. I braced myself again and pushed again. I heard the blood roaring in my ears. I pushed for my life, desperately trying to lever up the wood, even the tiniest fraction. Even a hairline crack would be enough. I’d be able to breathe. I could suck in the cool air.

  But the piece of wood didn’t budge. Not even a hairline crack. I pushed and pushed, and red lightning began to flash in my head. I was sure it was going to budge. I knew it would budge. It had to.

  It didn’t.

  It wasn’t going to move. Not by the tiniest fraction. I couldn’t do it. I was too weak. It was too late. I kept pushing at the wooden barrier, giving it everything I had, but that was no longer very much. My arms were cylinders made of damp twisted rags.

  From the darkness below, the fumes rose towards me.

  Nevada—

  * * *

  Nevada was staring down at me. I realised I’d heard the sound of something shifting, something dragging and thudding, just before she lifted away the big square sheet of wood and looked down at me. The sky behind her was pale blue, denim just starting to fade. Dawn.

  We stared at each other in the early morning light.

  I realised another sound had stopped. The engine.

  “Come on out,” said Nevada. “Can you move?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not too affected by the fumes?”

  I slithered out of the hole, the cool air embracing me, and then Nevada embracing me. She kissed me. “Poor you, you smell like an exhaust pipe.” She helped me to my feet.

  I said, “You smell wonderful.” She did. She smelled like life. Over her shoulder, silhouetted against the rising sun, I saw the big purposeful shape of a tractor. That was the engine that had been running. It was silent now. I saw a long red hose snaking from it, lying on the ground in coils, running up the gentle hillside slope to wherever the badger had put its breathing hole.

  I turned back and looked at the entrance hole. A small dark opening, a squashed circle tucked under some tree roots in the side of the hill. It was so tiny I couldn’t believe I’d fitted in it. Beside it lay the square of plywood and a heap of sandbags that had been piled on the plywood until Nevada had dragged them off.

  I breathed the sweet air and looked at her, smiling and sweaty from recent exertions, a lock of her raven-black hair plastered to her forehead. All I wanted to do was sit there and look at her, but I had to get up. “I need to pee,” I said. “I’ve been holding it in all night. It’s funny, but I’m almost more relieved that I didn’t wet myself than that I didn’t die.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered if you had wet yourself,” said Nevada.

  “I know. I think it’s just that I can wrap my head around the humiliation of pissing my pants, and wetting the badger’s nice clean bed—”

  “Was it nice and clean?”

  “Relatively speaking. But I can’t wrap my head around being dead.”

  “Who can?” said Nevada. She held my hand while I pissed a smoking stream into the cold morning air as the sun came up and the birds began to sing. A pastoral landscape. Urinating city-dweller and girlfriend. It was a moment of utter peace.

  At least it was until I turned my head to the left, towards the tractor, and noticed someone lying there. It was a skinhead, the smaller of last night’s ‘hippies’.

  “He was operating the tractor when I arrived,” said Nevada, following the direction of my gaze. I zipped up and stared at the unmoving figure.

  “He didn’t just set it running and leave it?” For some reason, this is what I’d imagined they’d done.

  “No, he was keeping a close personal eye on things. Maybe because he wanted to make sure he did a good job. Anyway, I had to deal with him.”

  I took a few steps towards the tractor, then stopped. He was lying there on the ground with his face in the dirt, mouth open and eyes shut. He looked very young, as people sometimes do when they’re sleeping.

  Or when they’re…

  I said, “Are you sure he’s all right?”

  “No.”

  “Did you hit him hard?”

  “Yes.”

  To me he looked terribly, terminally inert. I averted my gaze. “What did you hit him with?”

  Nevada nodded. “There’s a tool box on the other side of the tractor, full of all sorts of useful implements. I think this was something for removing tyres. It was big and it was made of metal, that was the main thing.”

  I said, choosing my words carefully, “Do you think you hit him too hard?”

  “You know what? I don’t really care.”

  I turned away from the tractor. The sun was coming up over the fields, the light watery and orange. I stared into it, feeling its warmth on my face. I said, “How did you find me?”

  “They got hold of your phone.”

  “Yes, they took it from me.”

  “Well, they sent a text message pretending to be you. It said you had found something vitally important and you needed to meet me. In the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere. It was obviously a trap, but I played along and arranged a rendezvous. When they got there I was already in place, in hiding, watching them. Then I texted to say that I couldn’t make it, that I was going to be a few hours late. So they went back to wherever they’d come from.”

  “And you followed them?”

  “Yes. First back to their farmhouse, where they split up and the little one went off, and luckily I followed him.”

  I looked at the body lying by the tractor. “Here.”

  “Yes. I saw the tractor and saw the hose and the sett and everything, and I worked out what he was doing.”

  “Thank god.”

  “Thank god.”

  I felt something in my pocket. A damp, tightly folded piece of paper. It was the piece of paper from the tunnel, which they’d shoved in after me last night. I unfolded it.

  It was one of the leaflets the badger man had been handing out. I read it with interest. I’d wondered about it all night long, unable to decipher it in the dark. It spoke of solidarity with the badgers. And suggested that volunteers could chain themselves to machinery and even occupy setts.

  “Occupy setts,” I said.

  Nevada nodded. “It’s what gave them the idea.”

  I said, “That’s why they left me with the leaflet.”

  “So you’d seem to be a save-the-badger activist.”

  “Exactly. Like chaining myself to a tree to stop it being cut down.” I looked at the dark mouth of the sett, the morning sunlight probing at it. “It would have been a tragic accident.”

  Nevada nodded again. “It certainly would have muddied the water in any murder investigation.”

  I looked around; the golden sunlight was stealing over the fields, moving the shadows of trees.

  “Even so,” I said, “they were crazy to do it on their own farm.”

  “This isn’t their own farm.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No. Their place is a couple of miles away.”

  That made sense. I looked at Nevada. “Do you know how to get there?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  The rising sun was growing brighter and more intense, ambushing us with bursts of brilliance between clusters of trees as we drove along winding country lanes. At the wheel, Nevada was wearing sunglasses. I said, “I’m not going home until we get what we came for.”

  She studied the road. “That’s the spirit. Just because you were nearly gassed to death, you’r
e not going to pass up the opportunity of obtaining a rare record.”

  “That’s right. I’m made of sterner stuff than that.”

  “Indeed you are.”

  We parked the car half a mile from the Nazi farmhouse down a narrow side road. From there we walked over fields. Nevada had scouted all this last night. “It looked very different through the night-vision binoculars. But I think I remember the way.” She did indeed, and after a pleasant ten-minute walk through the countryside we were sheltering behind a barn opposite the main building of the farmhouse.

  It was no longer a working farm, just buildings and several acres of land surrounding them, consisting of hedges, woods and overgrown fields. Some fairly new-looking fences demarcated the edge of the property. I guessed that what had once been extensive land belonging to the farm had now been sold to the neighbours, who would actually be able to work them. Meanwhile, no one here was earning a living through the honest sweat of their brow.

  “Judging by last night, it’s just the two of them,” said Nevada.

  “And no dog.”

  “And thankfully no dog.”

  I peered around the edge of the barn at the farmhouse. It was rather a pretty building made of irregularly shaped grey bricks. A motorcycle was leaning up against the wall and a white Hyundai van and a blue Range Rover were parked outside. I said, “Do we just wait for him to leave?”

  “Of course not,” said Nevada. She took out a phone.

  “What’s that?”

  “His brother’s phone. I took it from him when I knocked him out. Just like they took yours from you. I thought, Two can play at that game.”

  “Good thinking.” I watched while she composed a text: Come quick. To be more precise, the message read: Kum kwik.

  “That’s the way they actually spell,” said Nevada. “I made a point of studying the style of their messages— something they weren’t bright enough to do when they stole your phone and pretended to be you.”

  She was about to press send when the phone suddenly came to life in her hand, vibrating and flashing and playing a jaunty tune. We both nearly jumped out of our bodies.

  The ring tone was ‘I Get Around’ by the Beach Boys, of all things. A message flashed on the screen. Caz calling. Nevada stared at me, waving the phone in the air as if it had suddenly grown red hot.

  “What do I do?”

  “For god’s sake, don’t press answer.”

  She peered at the phone. “No. Ah, it’s all right, it’s going to voicemail.”

  We let it go to voicemail and then we dialled the voicemail number and listened. An angry male voice rattled from the phone, with just the trace of a country accent. I thought I recognised it from last night, but then I’d been listening through a sack, so I couldn’t swear to it. It said, “You should be done by now. Answer the bloody phone.” There was an angry, strained sigh before it cut off.

  Just then there was the sound of a door slamming. We looked around the edge of the barn and saw the bigger of the two skinheads—the ‘hippie’ who’d lost his wig in the car park. He came out of the farmhouse and climbed into the blue Range Rover and started the engine.

  He pulled away.

  As soon as he was gone, we went in.

  29. NAZI FARM

  The door wasn’t even locked, much to Nevada’s disappointment. She had purchased some kind of new electronic lock-picking device she wanted to try out. We stepped inside the farmhouse. Outside it was warm and the sun was rising fast. In here it was all cold, dank shadows. There was a smell of damp in the narrow hallway that ran the width of the house. To one side of us was a washing machine, apparently no longer in service, just abandoned there in the hallway. There was a pile of cardboard boxes on top of it containing ill-assorted muddy rubber boots. These guys knew how to live.

  Further down the shadowy hall to our right were five really big cardboard boxes, each about the size of the washing machine. We went to look at them.

  The first four were full of Golden Eagle cigarettes. Cartons and cartons of them. They were apparently manufactured in Vietnam. “I wonder if the full and correct import duty has been paid on all of these?” I said.

  “They’re obviously selling them on the black market,” said Nevada.

  I estimated the number of cartons sitting in this hallway and did a quick calculation. “And making a lot of money from it.”

  “To spend on what?” said Nevada, looking at me. We went and looked in the fifth box.

  It was full of guns.

  “Question answered,” said Nevada. I left her looking through the firearms while I went in search of the record.

  I turned left down the hallway. There was more light here, from the windows at the front of the house. I could see that the floor was covered with what had once been handsome green and white tiles, now layered with overlapping muddy footprints. I followed the heaviest flow of footsteps and they led me to a large room at the far end. This room was long and dark and ran the length of the farmhouse. There were several sets of windows in the wall to my left, but they were all heavily sealed with brown drapes.

  I had been expecting Nazi flags, but the denizens of the house had gone one better. The entire room was painted red, with fierce crude brushstrokes, except for one perfectly executed circle of white at the far end, containing a precisely incised black swastika. The circle and swastika had clearly absorbed all the decorators’ energies and all their concentration. After they’d done it they’d obviously got bored doing the rest of the job. All that fucking red paint.

  And, now that I noticed it, they’d actually missed a corner of the ceiling, up above the door and to the right, at a difficult-to-reach angle, which showed the previous lime-green floral wallpaper underneath.

  It rather spoiled the dramatic effect.

  But I was far more interested in the record player. It was tucked in beside the fireplace, not an ideal position from a temperature point of view, but it provided a handy alcove. Beside it was a long wooden sideboard displaying carefully placed, if dusty, artefacts. Included among these was a German army helmet, a rather phoney-looking dagger with SS on the handle, a book—Mein Kampf of course—and a rack of records. I quickly looked through the records. They were mostly the speeches of Hitler and other luminaries, but there were also some recordings of Wagner, old Decca mono pressings, which deserved a better home.

  The record player was some kind of German make, appropriately enough, with 78, 45 and 33rpm speed settings.

  And there it was, on the turntable.

  The twelve-inch vinyl Victory Disc of ‘Deep Penetration’ by the Flare Path Orchestra, composed by Danny Overland. It looked like it hadn’t been touched since Billy had taken that picture with his phone all those months ago.

  They didn’t use the record player much. It was basically just for display.

  The record was thick with dust. That didn’t matter. A quick cleaning would sort it out. I lifted it off. The other side—the underside—was perfectly clean. It featured another Danny Overland composition, entitled ‘Wanganui’. I needed something to wrap the record in, to protect it.

  I looked around the room. It was a strangely empty space. The concrete floor wasn’t carpeted, but there were several large frayed rugs spread across it. These were Indian, and I assumed they had been chosen because they had some patterns resembling swastika motifs. These guys never let go of a theme.

  Standing clustered on the rugs were several ill-assorted old leather armchairs. These were perhaps chosen to give the atmosphere of an exclusive gentleman’s club. If so, it was an atmosphere rather undermined by the large tottering stack of colourful and pornographic wank magazines stacked to elbow height in easy reach of one of the armchairs. In another armchair someone had left a tattered beige sweater.

  I put the record in the sweater, folded it carefully, and turned towards the door. As I turned I saw a phone on the sideboard, plugged into a charger. It looked like my phone. I went and picked it up.

  It w
as my phone.

  I tugged it free of the charger and stuck it in my pocket, feeling disproportionately happy. It was good to know that such a personal possession was no longer in the hands of the enemy. As I pocketed it, something caught my eye. It was the copy of Mein Kampf.

  What I had thought was a bookmark sticking out of it was actually a pamphlet. And something about the colour of the pamphlet’s cover was familiar. I pulled it out of the book. I’d lost their place now.

  It was entitled The Crucial Racial Question and featured a crude cartoon of an insect with semi-human features.

  I stuck it in with the record and got out of there. Nevada met me in the hallway. “Did you get it?”

  “Yes, it’s here,” I said. “What did you glean?”

  “They’ve got a lot of cigarettes and a lot of guns.”

  “Everything that’s bad for the health,” I said. “Let’s get out of here and go home.”

  “Agreed.”

  We were just making our way to the front door when the blue Range Rover came back.

  It pulled up in the driveway and stopped right outside. We stepped back from the door, moving away from the window. Nevada looked at me. We edged back down the hall and paused by another window, peering out through the mildewed curtains to check on the situation again. They weren’t getting out of the car.

  “What do we do?” said Nevada.

  “Go out the back way?”

  “Are we even sure there is a back way?”

  Just then the skinhead brothers got out of the car. The smaller one, last seen lying on the ground by the tractor, was holding his head and looked pale and very much the worse for wear. But he was alive. I felt relieved—then ashamed that I was relieved. The fucker had tried to gas me like a poor fucking badger.

  Then the two of them started towards the front door.

  I looked at Nevada, then at the doors along the hallway leading to various rooms—all potentially dead ends. We had to choose one. I picked one and took Nevada’s hand and pulled her towards it. She pulled back. I looked at her. She nodded eagerly at the window. I looked out.