Requiem

by Clare Francis

  If anything, the wind seemed to be freshening. No point in hanging about then.

  He took a swig of lemonade, pushed a toffee into his mouth and banked steeply to port to line up for a dummy run.

  Rona snorted in sudden agitation. Alusha paused in her work to shush her. ‘What’s the matter with you? Go away.’

  The mare stamped her feet, her shoes ringing on the hard standing in front of the stable.

  ‘Away,’ Alusha Mackenzie repeated. ‘You’re being a nuisance.’ She waved her paintbrush at Rona and shooed her into the paddock. ‘Off with you.’

  The pony trotted off and stopped a short distance away, tossing her head. Turning back to the stable door, Alusha dipped her brush in the preservative and slapped some more onto the bare wooden door. The thin green mixture had an evil smell and instinctively she pulled back to avoid inhaling it.

  Somewhere an engine buzzed lazily in the sky, like an insect in the sun. Rona snorted again.

  Alusha laughed at her. ‘What do you want this time, eh?’ She finished the door and, fetching a large metal bucket, upended it and positioned it in the doorway. Balancing on it, she could just reach the lintel.

  When it came to it, there was no decision really. It had to be the south-west–north-east line; Duggan wasn’t about to kill himself to earn a mention in anyone’s rule book. Besides, he should be able to adjust his course to allow for drift. It couldn’t be that difficult.

  He found his height, lined up on an imaginary line a width inside the southern perimeter of the plantation, and, holding a steady course, hovered his thumb over the spray switch.

  The conifers sped towards and under him. He switched on. There was an answering billow of vapour from under the wings. That was something anyway; he supposed he should be grateful. Eyes front again, he was surprised to see broadleaf trees moving in under his port wing. The gust must be stronger than he’d thought. He compensated, touching the rudder once and again, only to find that either he’d overdone it or else the crosswind had dropped suddenly, because he was too far into the conifers now. Cursing, he eased the Porter back on line, only for the same thing to happen again. He was weaving about like a bloody amateur.

  Not a moment too soon, the end of the plantation loomed up and vanished beneath. He switched off the spray and swivelled his head back.

  No change: the spray continued to course lavishly from the atomizers. He felt a vicious choking anger. Swearing loud and long, he flicked the switch rapidly back and forth, kicking the heel of his hand against it, then leant down and rapidly rotated the control valve beside his feet until, quite suddenly, the indicator light went off and, an instant later, the trail of vapour finally thinned and died.

  He looked up. Christ! He was almost over the parkland; the big house was not far ahead to port. Instinctively he took the Porter into a tight turn to starboard, rapidly gaining height to clear the rising ground beneath.

  He twisted in his seat to press his face against the Perspex and look back towards the park. Nothing. Thank God. No sheep. No small figure, face upturned, like that child the other week.

  The relief left him exhausted. He knew exactly what he was going to do now: give up and return to base. And he knew precisely what he was going to do once he got there: telephone Keen. Rehearsing the exact combination of expletives kept him occupied all the way home.

  The buzzing hung languorously in the air, faded, then got louder again. Rona, unseen by her mistress, sidled silently back towards the stable and, blowing loudly in Alusha’s ear, gave her a terrible fright.

  ‘That’s it!’ Alusha exclaimed, stepping off the bucket. She made a grab for Rona’s bridle, but the mare was too quick for her and danced away.

  Alusha held out some sugar. ‘Come on, you greedy pig.’

  The pony, despite her uncharacteristic nervousness, couldn’t resist the sugar and within a minute Alusha had caught her and hitched her to the ring on the stable wall. ‘And here you stay until I’ve finished.’

  The soft drone grew louder again. Alusha shaded her eyes and looked up but, seeing nothing, returned to her brush and her pot and dabbed some more green fluid on the door frame.

  For some reason the smell of the stuff suddenly clutched at her throat. It was incredibly strong, like ammonia or worse. She clamped a hand over her mouth and nose and tried not to breathe, but the stuff seeped into her nose and throat. She staggered off the bucket and retreated onto the apron. She coughed, and the act of coughing made her pull a deep draught of air into her lungs. Air that wasn’t air; air that was sharp and burning. Inexplicably, the fumes seemed to have followed her across the apron. By the time she had raised her collar over her mouth, it was too late. The acrid vapour was eating at her lungs, her eyes were streaming, her head was weaving violently.

  She tried to find her way back to the stable. She was dimly aware of noise, of a clattering of hooves and sounds of alarm from Rona. But the collision, when it came, caught her by surprise. One moment she was groping her way back towards the stable, the next moment the bulk of Rona’s hindquarters was barrelling into her, a solid weight that cannoned into her shoulder and toppled her over.

  Her head didn’t hit the concrete terribly hard – in fact, the impact was more like a hard knock than a solid thud – but it was enough to send her sliding into a grey land somewhere between panic and nightmare, a land in which her eyes saw nothing, in which every breath drew her deeper into some terrible darkness.

  Chapter 5

  FIFTEEN COLUMN-INCHES. Daisy pasted up the fourth and final cutting, already worn and ageing from the cutting agency’s tardy service, and held the finished montage at arm’s length. Not bad if one overlooked the origin of the stories – the Newbury Chronicle, the Reading News and such like – and imagined that the items had appeared in the national dailies. Alice Knowles’ demonstration hadn’t merited the attention of the nation, not in print, not on radio or TV. Nor had it, apparently, justified the undivided concentration of the journalists who’d covered it. One described Aldeb as a fumigant instead of a fungicide, while another talked vaguely about the dangers of processing potatoes as if the Knowleses ran a chip factory instead of a farm. All in all, the coverage was no better or worse than she’d expected.

  The street door banged as someone arrived and Daisy heard the unmistakable sound of Alan clearing his throat, something he did so regularly first thing in the morning that she suspected him of being a secret smoker. Not that she dared say so; Alan wasn’t too good with jokes.

  She heard him enter the cubicle next door and shuffle around, the rubber soles of his shoes squelching softly on the lino-tiled floor. Catch didn’t run to carpets or other such luxuries. Under normal circumstances it wouldn’t have run to an office near King’s Cross either, but the place had been let to them by a sympathetic developer at a peppercorn rent. Situated in the rambling basement of an Edwardian house due for demolition in a couple of years’ time, with high barred windows and woefully little daylight, it was not the ideal workplace, and certainly not in winter when, for lack of central heating, they had to suffer the fumes of mobile gas heaters, an expedient which did little for their corporate image let alone their lungs.

  Alan appeared round the door and, sorting through the mail, dropped a batch onto Daisy’s desk. ‘Can we have a talk some time?’ he said.

  ‘Now, if you like.’

  He hesitated as if he’d rather have put the moment off, then sank into the chair beside her desk. Alan, dark and slightly built with the stoic tenacity of the seasoned campaigner, had come to Catch by way of Greenpeace, the anti-fur campaign Lynx and, for a brief time ten years before, his own environmentally friendly cleaning products company which had folded after six months, a victim of being ahead of its time.

  Picking up a bulldog grip, he started operating the jaws. ‘The Knowles case. What exactly are we recommending to the Committee?’

  Daisy was on her guard. The two of them had discussed this only the previous afternoon. Alan was well a
ware of her views on the subject, so this could only be the opening gambit in an attempt to shift her.

  ‘We’re going to recommend full backing for the Knowleses, in their legal action and whatever else is needed,’ she reminded him.

  Alan closed the bulldog grip on his finger, screwed up his mouth in mild pain. Withdrawing the finger, he examined it carefully. ‘I think it would be a mistake.’

  ‘What – to help them?’ Daisy tried to smooth any exasperation out of her voice. ‘But why, for God’s sake? We agreed – we should do everything we could – ’

  ‘Their case won’t succeed.’

  This needed to be taken gently, not an approach that came naturally to Daisy. ‘How can you say it’s doomed? We don’t know till we try, do we?’

  ‘A case like that – it’ll take years and God only knows how many thousands of pounds.’

  ‘I know, but we’re not promising the family a lot of cash, are we? Just a token offering to get them going.’

  ‘And back-up – data, information, research, liaison …’

  ‘Well, of course …’

  ‘Which means a helluva lot of time and money.’ Alan agitated the jaws of the grip so rapidly that they made a loud clacking noise, like the teeth of a mad animal. He looked up, wearing his most resolute expression. ‘We decided right at the beginning, when Catch was first set up, that it would be absolutely futile to take on the agrochemi-cal industry direct while we had such limited funds, that confrontation would be a sure way of defeating ourselves. Nothing’s changed since then, Daisy. In fact, if anything there’s even more reason to avoid getting bogged down in something like this. We’re just as stretched as before, if not more so. Committed on too many fronts – the new newsletter, setting up all the regional groups … well – you know how it is. But a legal fight … it’d be a minefield, Daisy. We can’t afford to go pioneering, not over totally untested ground. We just don’t have the resources. The media – that’s our battlefield, that’s what we understand, it’s the only place where we know how to win.’

  Daisy let this flow over her; it was familiar, not to say well-trodden, ground. ‘But it’s not us who’re taking on the case,’ she pointed out. ‘It’s the Knowles family.’

  ‘Quite.’ He waved the bulldog grip in the air, as if he had just succeeded in explaining everything. ‘The Knowleses should never have been encouraged to take legal action in the first place. The scientists are still totally divided, the evidence is too weak for any British court of law. You know that, I know that, but it seems the Knowleses of all people don’t know it.’

  ‘You’re making it sound as if I pushed them into it,’ she said defensively. ‘You’re making it sound as if I encouraged them. Which isn’t true, and you know it.’

  Alan shot her a stern look. ‘Put it this way, perhaps you could have done a better job of discouraging them.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Daisy said sharply. ‘And how exactly do you tell people that the law is a total waste of time? How do you tell them that their whole experience has been for nothing?’

  ‘You tell them, that’s what you do. You tell them because it’s true.’

  Daisy was losing ground but couldn’t see how to fight her way out of it.

  ‘Oh, the case’d get some publicity all right,’ Alan went on remorselessly. ‘On the last day of the case, that is. And maybe the first. But in the middle, all through the weeks and weeks of expert evidence and the months waiting for the second appeal, there’d be zilch. The only sure thing would be the catastophic expense and almost certain bankruptcy for the family.’ He finished with a flourish: ‘It seems rather a high price to pay for a little publicity.’

  Daisy leant back in her chair and folded her arms tightly across her chest. ‘So what on earth are we doing here then?’ she said, unable to suppress the frustration in her voice. ‘I mean, if we can’t help people like the Knowleses?’

  Alan stood up. ‘You know the answer to that – to campaign. It’s the only game we can play. More to the point, it’s the only game we can – ’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said wearily, ‘I know, I know – it’s the only game we can afford.’

  A phone began to ring. Neither of them was in a hurry to answer it and it continued to sound eerily through the dingy rooms. Suddenly the street door banged and they heard the rapid tap of Jenny’s metal-heeled boots as she ran into the general office to snatch up the phone.

  In the silence, Daisy picked up her argument again. ‘We should be doing both. Campaigning and offering support. Honestly, Alan, what’s the point otherwise?’

  He gave an exasperated laugh. ‘But, Daisy … It’s always a mistake to get too …’ He hesitated. She had the feeling he had been about to say emotional, not a word she would have appreciated. Instead he murmured: ‘… involved in these things.’

  Jenny’s voice called from the outer office, summoning Alan to the phone. Before disappearing he gave a gesture of regret, an affirmation that, according to his reckoning, he had won his point.

  Daisy stood up and took a couple of turns round the filing cabinets, trying to make sense of her anger. It wasn’t just the lack of money, though that was a continual problem, it wasn’t even Alan’s habit of putting a dampener on her most precious ideas, though he did that often enough to make her suspect that he got a perverse satisfaction from it. No, the worst part was the knowledge that he had a point, that much as she longed to see a case brought against the agrochemical camp it would be wrong to let it go ahead at the Knowleses’ expense. However determined Alice Knowles was, however keen her son to find a purpose in his illness, it was doubtful that a case fought with such meagre resources would be worth the emotional and financial strain. Reluctant though she was to admit it, Alan could have been right, and she should have done a better job of talking the Knowleses out of it.

  Dropping dejectedly back into her chair, she leafed through her diary, looking for a date when she could go and see Alice again. The weekend, as usual, was the only time she had free.

  She started on the mail, automatically flipping the discarded envelopes into the box earmarked for recycling. Magazines, journals, reports, scientific papers, members’ letters, non-members’ letters: too much of it, always too much of it.

  Opening a large envelope, she pulled out three smaller ones, each addressed to a box number at Farmers Weekly. In a guilty reflex, Daisy glanced over her shoulder. This was a little idea she’d forgotten to mention to Alan, but now was not, she felt, the moment to come clean. The ad had been simple enough: ALDEB. Anyone experiencing health problems from exposure to this fungicide, please write Box No… . Normally Catch accumulated their case histories through people like the Farmers’ Union Health Executive, through newspaper articles or contacts made on Catch’s behalf by friendly toxicologists. To Daisy these haphazard methods had always seemed inadequate, and she’d long been haunted by the almost certain knowledge that there were dozens of other cases out there, just waiting to be uncovered.

  The first letter was not promising. It was from a lady in Wiltshire who’d worked on a chicken farm and wanted to know if Aldeb was the medicine they were always feeding the chickens, because if so, she thought it was responsible for her ‘hormones’. She’d been under the doctor for months, had had several operations, but was still suffering all her old troubles.

  Daisy put the letter to one side. Investigating chickenfeed wasn’t within Catch’s present brief, though if anyone bothered to analyse a modern broiler hen’s intestines, it probably would be.

  The next letter was from a Lincolnshire farmer whose wife had developed cancer. Their main crop was potatoes and, until they’d been alerted to the dangers of Aldeb the previous year, they’d been using the chemical continuously. The wife had been in charge of warehousing and storage, which involved regular applications of fungicide in enclosed conditions. Daisy felt a small spark of optimism: this was more like it.

  The third letter was from a man with a Hertfordshire address. Daisy wasn’t quite
sure what to make of it. He said he’d come across Aldeb and would like to tell her about it. He was in London for a few days, staying at a friend’s in Battersea, and suggested they meet for tea. No details, no suggestion of how he’d come into contact with Aldeb; it was all rather vague and unsatisfactory.

  She went back to the farmer’s letter and read it again. Definitely worth following up. She started to dial the number then, remembering that farmers were rarely home at nine in the morning, called Simon instead. He was generally in the flat at this time of day, bashing out his articles before going in to the Sunday Times at about eleven to do his telephone research at the newspaper’s expense. The later part of the day was for interviews and meetings, the evenings for the novel. Between all this came Daisy, at least she thought she fitted into the picture somewhere, though it was difficult to be sure.

  ‘Is there any medical evidence of a link?’ he asked as soon as Daisy told him about the letter. ‘She might have got ill anyway.’

  ‘Not yet,’ Daisy conceded. ‘But if we run some tests on her and the results tally with the Knowles family – well, we might have something.’

  ‘Even then …’

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘Not enough, is it?’

  ‘It’s a start.’

  ‘You could do with some more cases.’

  Daisy thought of the Hertfordshire man who wanted to meet her for tea. ‘I’m working on it,’ she said. She almost asked Simon if he was working on the story too, but she didn’t like to press him, not when she’d given him a second hard sell only the previous week. She didn’t want him to think she was obsessive, not when she’d hardly got into her stride.

  ‘How about that Truffaut film?’ she asked lightly, putting a low inviting note into her voice. But if there were ways to entice Simon into sudden acts of recklessness this, apparently, was not one of them.