by Ian Rankin
It had been raining stair rods the whole journey, but now the clouds were breaking up, showing chinks of early-evening light. Reeve wasn’t the only one getting off the train, and he studied his fellow travelers. They looked tired—Tisbury to London was a hell of a distance to commute—and had eyes only for the walk ahead, whether to parking lot or town house.
Joshua Vincent stood outside the station with his hands in his Barbour pockets. He was quick to spot Reeve; no one else looked like they didn’t know quite where to go.
Reeve had been expecting a farming type, tall and heavy-bodied with ruddy cheeks or maybe a sprouting beard to match the wild hair. But Vincent, though tall, was rake-thin, clean-shaven, and wore round, shining glasses. His fair hair was thinning badly; more scalp showing than follicles. He was pale and reticent and could have passed for a high-school science nerd. He was watching the commuters.
“Mr. Reeve?”
They shook hands. Vincent wanted them to wait there until all the commuters had left.
“Checking I wasn’t followed?” Reeve asked.
Vincent gave a thin smile. “Easy to spot a stranger at this railway station. They can’t help looking out of place. I’m so sorry to hear about Jim.” The tone of voice was genuine, not overwrought the way Giles Gulliver had been, and the more affecting for that. “How did it happen?”
They walked to the car while Reeve started his story. Through several tellings, he had learned to summarize, sticking to facts and not drawing conclusions. The car was a Subaru 4x4. Reeve had seen them around the farming towns in the West Highlands. He kept on talking as they drove, leaving Tisbury behind them. The countryside was a series of rises and dips with irregular wooded sections. They chased crows and magpies off the rough-finished road, then rolled over the flattened vermin which had attracted the birds in the first place.
Vincent didn’t interrupt the narrative once. And when Reeve had finished, they drove in silence until Reeve thought of a couple of things to add to his story.
As he was finishing, they turned off the road and started bumping along a mud track, churned up by farm machinery. Reeve could see the farm in front of them, a simple three-sided layout around a courtyard, with other buildings dotted about. It was very much like his own home.
Vincent stopped in the yard. A snapped command at a barking untethered sheepdog sent it padding back to its lair. A lone lamb bounded up to Reeve, bleating for food. He had the door open but hadn’t stepped out yet.
“I’d put your boots on before you do that,” Vincent warned him. So Reeve opened the bag he’d brought with him. Inside were all Jim’s notes plus a new pair of black Wellingtons, bought in the army surplus store near Finsbury Park Station. He kicked off his shoes and left them in the car, then pulled on the boots. He swiveled out of his seat and landed in a couple of inches of mud.
“Thanks for the tip,” he said, closing the door. “Is this your place?”
“No, I just stay here sometimes.” A young woman was peering at them through the kitchen window. Vincent waved at her, and she waved back. “Come on,” he said, “let’s catch a breath of air.”
In the long barn farthest from the house, two men were preparing to milk a couple of dozen cows, attaching clear plastic pumps to the teats. The cows’ udders were swollen and veinous, and complaints filled the shed. Vincent said hello to the men but did not introduce them. The milking machine shuddered as Reeve passed it. The two men paid him no attention at all.
On the other side of the milking shed, they came to a wall beyond which were darkening fields, trees silhouetted in the far distance.
“So?” Reeve asked. He was growing impatient.
Vincent turned to him. “I think people are trying to kill me, too.”
Then he told his story. “What do you know about BSE, Mr. Reeve?”
“Only what I’ve read in Jim’s notes.”
Vincent nodded. “Jim contacted me because he knew I’d expressed concern about OPs.”
“Organophosphorous materials?”
“That’s right. Have you heard of ME?”
“It’s a medical complaint.”
“There’s been a lot of controversy over it. Basically, some doctors have been skeptical that it exists, yet people keep coming down with the symptoms.” He shrugged. “The letters stand for myalgic encephalomyelitis.”
“I can see why it’s called ME. The E in BSE stands for something similar.”
“Encephalopathy. Encephalon just means the brain, from the Greek enkephalos, meaning ‘within the head.’ I learned that a few years ago.” He stared out over the fields. “I’ve learned a lot these past few years.” He looked back at the farm. “This place is or-ganic. Do you know how BSE is supposed to have started?”
“I read something in Jim’s notes about animal feed.”
Vincent nodded. “MAFF—that’s the Ministry of Agriculture—relaxed their rules in the 1980s, allowing the rendering industry to take a few shortcuts. Don’t ask me why it happened or who was responsible, but it happened. They removed two processes, saving time and money. One was a solvent extraction, the other a steam-heat treatment. You see, the rendering industry was rendering down sheep and cows to feed to other cows. Bits of meat and bone were going into the feed cake.”
“Right.” Reeve buttoned up his jacket, still damp from a dash through the rain to catch the train. The evening was growing chilly.
“Because those two processes had been removed, prions got into the feed cake. Prion protein is sometimes called PrP.”
“I saw it in the notes, I think.”
“It causes scrapie in sheep.” Vincent raised a finger. “Remember, this is the accepted story I’m giving you. So the feed cake was infected, and the cows were being given the bovine form of sheep scrapie, which is BSE.” He paused, then smiled. “You’re wondering what all this has to do with Spanish cook-ing oil.”
Reeve nodded.
Vincent started to walk, following the wall along the back of the milking shed. “Well, the Spanish blamed contaminated cooking oil and left it at that. Only, some of the victims had never touched the oil.”
“And some of the cows who hadn’t eaten the infected feed still caught BSE?”
Vincent shook his head. “Oh, no, the point is this: some farms—organic farms—who had used the so-called infected feed didn’t catch the disease at all.”
“Hang on a second . . .”
“I know what you’re thinking. But organic farms are allowed to buy in twenty percent conventional feed.”
“So you’re saying BSE had nothing to do with feed cake, infected or otherwise?”
Vincent smiled without humor. “Why use the past tense? BSE is still with us. The ‘infected’ feed cake was banned on the eighteenth of July 1988.” He pointed into the distance. “I can show you calves less than six months old who have BSE. Vets from MAFF call them BABs: Born After the Ban. There’ve been more than ten thousand of them. To date, nearly a hundred and fifty thousand cows have died in the UK from BSE.”
They had come back to the farmyard. Vincent opened the Subaru. “Get in,” he said. Reeve got in. Vincent kept telling his story as he drove.
“I mentioned ME a little while back. When it first came to be noticed, it was supposed to have its roots in everyday stress. They called it Yuppie Flu. It isn’t called that nowadays. Now we call it Farmers’ Flu. That’s because so many farmers show symptoms. There’s a man—used to be a farmer, now he’s more of a campaigner, though he still tries to farm when they let him—who’s trying to discover why there’s an increase in the occurrence of neurological diseases like ME, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s.”
“What do you mean, ‘when they let him’?”
“He’s been threatened,” Vincent said simply. “People helping him have died. Car crashes, unexplained deaths, accidents . . .” He turned to Reeve. “Only four or five, you understand. Not yet an epidemic.”
They were winding down country lanes barely the width of tw
o cars. The sun had gone down.
Vincent put the heater on. “It may just be coincidence,” he said, “that BSE started to appear around the same time that MAFF was telling farmers to protect against warble fly in their cattle by rubbing on an organophosphorus treatment. What some of us would like to know is whether OPs can cause prions to mutate.”
“So these OP chemicals are to blame?”
“Nobody knows. It sometimes seems to me hardly anybody wants to know. I mean, imagine the embarrassment if it turned out a government directive had started the whole thing off. Imagine the claims for compensation that would be put in by the farmers suffering from OP poisoning. Imagine the cost to the agrichemical industry if they had to withdraw products, carry out expensive tests . . . maybe even pay compensation. We’re talking about a worldwide industry. The whole farming world is hooked on pesticides of one kind or another. And on the other side of the coin, if pesticides had to be withdrawn, and new ones created and tested, there’d be a gap of years—and in those years yields would decrease, pests would multiply, farms would go out of business, the cost of every foodstuff in the supermarket would rocket. You can see where that would lead: economic disaster.” He looked at Reeve again. “Maybe they’re right to try and stop us. What are a few lives when measured against an economic disaster of those proportions?”
Reeve shivered, digging deeper into his coat. He felt exhausted, lack of sleep and jet lag hitting him hard. “Who’s trying to stop you?”
“Could be any or all of them.”
“CWC?”
“Co-World Chemicals has a lot to lose. Its worldwide market share is worth billions of dollars annually. They’ve also got a very persuasive lobby which keeps the majority of farmers and governments on their side. Sweetened, as you might say.”
Reeve nodded, getting his meaning. “So there’s a cover-up going on.”
“To my mind undoubtedly, but then I would say that. I was suddenly fired from my job, a job I thought I was good at. When I began to be persuaded that the feed-cake explanation just wasn’t on, I spoke twice about it in public, sent out a single press release—and next thing I knew my job was being ‘phased out.’”
“I thought the National Farmers’ Union was supposed to be on the side of farmers.”
“It is on the side of farmers—or at least, it’s on the side of the majority of them, the ones with their heads in the sand.”
“Where are we going?”
“We’re nearly there.”
Reeve had half-thought he was going to be returned to the railroad station, meeting over. But, if anything, the landscape had grown less populous. They turned up a track and arrived at a high mesh gate topped with razor wire. A fence of similar height, similarly protected, stretched off either side. There were warning notices on the gate, picked out by the 4x4’s headlights, but nothing to say what the fence and razor wire were protecting.
When Reeve followed Vincent out of the Subaru, a smell hit the back of his throat and he nearly gagged. It lay heavy in the air; the smell of dead flesh.
“We have to walk around the perimeter to get a good look,” Vincent said. He turned on his flashlight. “It’s a good job of invisible landscaping. You’d really have to be keen before you got to see what’s inside.”
“There’s something I might as well ask you,” Reeve said. “God knows I’ve asked everyone else. Does the word Agrippa mean anything?”
“Of course,” Vincent said casually. “It’s a small R and D company, American-based.”
“My brother had the word written on a scrap of paper.”
“Maybe he was looking into Agrippa. The company is at the forefront of genetic mutation.”
“Meaning what exactly?” Reeve recalled something Fliss Hornby had said: Jim had been reading up on genetic patents.
“Meaning they take something and alter its genetic code, to try to make a better product. ‘Better’ being their description, not mine.”
“You mean like cotton?”
“Yes, Agrippa doesn’t have the patent on genetically engineered cotton. But the company is working on crops—trying for better yields and resistance to pests, trying to create strains that can be grown in hostile environments.” Vincent paused. “Imagine if you could plant wheat in the Sahara.”
“But if you produced resistant strains, that would do away with the need for pesticides, wouldn’t it?”
Vincent smiled. “Nature has a way of finding its way around these defenses. Still, there are some out there who would agree with you. That’s why CWC is spending millions on research.”
“CWC?”
“Didn’t I say? Agrippa is a subsidiary of Co-World Chemicals. Come on, this way.”
They followed the fence up a steep rise and down into a valley, then climbed again.
“We can see from here,” Vincent said. He switched off his flashlight.
It was a single large building, with trucks parked outside, illuminated by floodlights. Men in protective clothing, some wearing masks, wheeled trolleys between the trucks and the building. A tall thin chimney belched out acrid smoke.
“An incinerator?” Reeve guessed.
“Industrial-strength. It could melt a ship’s hull.”
“And they’re burning infected cattle?”
Vincent nodded.
“Did you bring Jim here?”
“Yes.”
“To make a point?”
“Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.”
“You should never tell a journalist that.”
Vincent smiled. “Burning the cattle isn’t going to make it go away, Mr. Reeve. That’s what your brother understood. There are other journalists like him in other countries. I’d guess each one is a marked man or woman. If BSE gets to humans, it’s called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Believe me, you wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy.”
But Reeve could picture himself syringing a strain of it into the arm of whoever had killed his brother.
There were other neurodegenerative diseases, too—motoneuron disease, multiple sclerosis—and they were all on the increase. Their conversation on the way back to the farm was all one-way, and all bad news. The more Josh Vincent talked, the more zeal-ous he became and the angrier and more frustrated he sounded.
“But what can you do?” Reeve asked at one point.
“Reexamine all pesticides, carry out tests on them. Use less of them. Turn farms into organic cooperatives. There are answers, but they’re not simple overnight panaceas.”
They parked in the farmyard again. The dog came out bark-ing. The lamb trotted over towards them. Reeve followed Vincent into the kitchen. Once inside the door, they took off their boots. The young woman was still at the sink beneath the window. She smiled and wiped her hands, coming forward to be in-troduced.
“Jilly Palmer,” said Vincent, “this is Gordon Reeve.”
They shook hands. “Pleased to meet you,” she said. She had a flushed complexion and a long braid of chestnut-colored hair. Her face was sharp, with angular cheekbones and a wry twist to her lips. Her clothes were loose, practical.
“Supper’s ready when you are,” she said.
“I’ll just show Gordon his room first,” Vincent said. He saw the surprise in Reeve’s face. “You can’t get back to London to-night. No trains.”
Reeve looked at Jilly Palmer. “I’m sorry if I —”
“No trouble,” she said. “We’ve a bedroom going spare, and Josh here made the supper. All I had to do was warm it through.”
“Where’s Bill?” Vincent asked.
“Young Farmers’. He’ll be back around ten.”
“Don’t be daft,” said Vincent, “pubs don’t shut till eleven.”
He sounded very different in this company: more relaxed, enjoying the warmth of the kitchen and normal conversation. But all that did, in Reeve’s eyes, was show how much strain the man was under the rest of the time, and how much this whole conspiracy had affected him.
He
thought he could see why Jim had taken on the story, why he would have run with it where others might have given up: because of people like Josh Vincent, scared and running and innocent.
His room was small and cold, but the blankets were plenti-ful. He took off his coat and hung it on a hook on the back of the door, hoping it would dry. His dark pullover was damp, too, so he peeled it off. The rest of him could dry in the kitchen. He found the bathroom and washed his hands and face in scalding water, then looked at himself in the mirror. The image of him injecting BSE into a tapped human vein was still there in the back of his mind. It had given him an idea—not something he could put into use just yet, but something he might need all the same . . .
In the kitchen the table had been laid for two. Jilly said she’d already eaten. She left them to it and closed the door after her.
“She never misses Coronation Street,” Vincent explained. “Lives out here, but has to get her fix of Lancashire grime.” He used oven mitts to lift the casserole from the oven. It was half full, but a substantial half. There was a lemonade bottle on the table and two glasses. Vincent unscrewed the cap and poured carefully. “Bill’s home brew,” he explained. “I think he only drinks down the pub to remind himself how good his own stuff tastes.”
The beer was light brown, with a head that disappeared quickly. “Cheers,” said Josh Vincent.
“Cheers,” said Reeve.
They ate in silence, hungrily, and chewed on home-baked bread. Towards the end of the meal, Vincent asked a few questions about Reeve—what he did, where he lived. He said he loved the Highlands and Islands, and wanted to hear all about Reeve’s survival courses. Reeve kept the description simple, leaving out more than he put in. He could see Vincent wasn’t really listening; his mind was elsewhere.
“Can I ask you something?” Vincent said finally.
“Sure.”
“How far did Jim get? I mean, did he find out anything we could use?”
“I told you, his disks disappeared. All I have are his written notes from London.”
