Requiem

by Clare Francis

  ‘No one has ever been adversely affected by Silveron,’ Schenker said.

  Everyone nodded to show they had known this all along.

  ‘Perhaps we could get the safety angle checked out by our legal department?’ the account executive said, trying to paper the cracks. ‘And if there’s anything we can say, we’ll find a way of saying it. In an effective and meaningful way, of course.’

  This was the usual advertising agency flannel. ‘But it should have been a selling point from the beginning,’ Schenker argued. ‘The company has a fine safety record. We should use it.’ He stood up. Those who’d been sitting quickly followed suit. There was a general air of expectancy. The agency were wondering if they’d got the account.

  He made for the door. ‘Oh, and the teaser,’ he said. ‘Silveron. It’s the greatest yet. It covers almost everything. That should do it, don’t you think?’ He flashed a quick smile to demonstrate that, given sufficient grounds for benevolence, he was capable of showing approval, and sped from the room with Cramm at his heels.

  Back in the limo Schenker sat staring silently out of the smoked-glass windows. As they neared Wall Street and their next appointment, he said abruptly: ‘Those rumours about the Aurora plant, Cramm. They could really hurt us.’

  Cramm nodded.

  ‘They have to be stopped.’

  Dublensky sat at the kitchen table and drank his after-breakfast coffee. Under the new routine he allowed himself no more than ten minutes for this indulgence before getting into the den and starting work. But today he let the time spin out a bit, not only because it made a change, but because, for all his self-discipline, a minute here or there wasn’t actually going to make any difference. Also there was the matter of the mail. He had checked the box but it still hadn’t arrived, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to settle down to anything else until it did.

  He could never get used to being home at this time of day, just as he couldn’t accustom himself to the quiet of an empty house. It seemed strange that Anne and Tad should hurry out of the door each morning, leaving him to all this silence. Worse though was the bald unavoidable fact that he had nothing to keep him occupied. In the weeks since the Allentown Chemical Company had dispensed with his services he’d fixed the guttering, the kitchen faucet and Tad’s bicycle, none of which had taken more than an hour or two even when he’d spun them out. The other household jobs, like painting the exterior and rehanging the damaged garage door, required money, thus relegating themselves to indefinite postponement.

  When his ten-plus minutes were up he washed his cup, dried it carefully, put it away, and went out to the mail box. It was still empty. Returning to the den he started his fifth perusal of the latest issue of Practical Scientist. In the first few days of his unemployment he’d applied for nothing but the cream of jobs, but then, as the doubts began their relentless siege on his confidence, he’d started to glance over a few of the lesser jobs, positions he would not normally have considered. Even then it wasn’t until he failed two interviews in succession that he began to write a second wave of applications.

  The first turn-down hadn’t surprised him too much – the job really wasn’t his bag – but the second had been a definite surprise. In fact, it would be more accurate to describe it as one helluva jolt. He’d had every reason to think he was in with a good chance: the CV–job specification fit had been excellent, the interview had gone well, he’d established an immediate empathy with the chief executive, but when the answer finally came it had been a flat inexplicable no.

  Anne took the news with narrowed lips, knowing eyes and a dark expression. For the first time in his marriage Dublensky avoided discussion with his wife, not only because he had a good idea of what she was going to say but because he wasn’t sure he was ready to hear it. The hiatus left him isolated and dejected, yet oddly determined, and when he won an interview with a small corporation in Maryland, he made the decision not to tell Anne until he had the result. He wanted to surprise her. The salary was significantly lower than he’d been used to and he was most definitely overqualified, but it was a position which would allow him to sink into a peaceful kind of obscurity.

  The mail man finally appeared, making his way fitfully up the street, and Dublensky ambled down the path to meet him.

  There were two letters for him; the one from the Maryland corporation lay on top. He did not open it immediately, but took it into the den and laid it on the desk in front of him. Even then he did not open it immediately. The crisp white envelope seemed charged with all the might and inescapable power of the agrochemical industry. As he reached forward to run his finger under the flap his sense of doom deepened and he realized that, whether from a subconscious need to prepare himself or a sudden faith in his own instincts, he had already accepted the worst.

  The realization did not stop his heart from taking a sharp turn as he pulled the single sheet from the envelope.

  Position filled.

  ‘They’re nailing you,’ Anne said as they lay in bed that night.

  ‘Honey, how could they?’ he argued despite himself. ‘I mean, this last company, they’re only a small outfit. They’ve no contacts with Morton-Kreiger.’

  ‘Oh no? The references, what about the references? Don’t tell me these corporations don’t follow them up. Don Reedy may have said some okay things on paper – though they were no more than okay, were they? I mean, just adequate – but what does he actually say when they call him, huh? Don’t tell me a quiet word doesn’t get whispered in their ears. You know – Dublensky’s a good man but difficult. Competent, sure, but slow. I mean, they wouldn’t have to say much, would they? They wouldn’t have to call you totally incompetent.’

  ‘But why would they bother?’ he asked, knowing the answer perfectly well but wanting to hear her say it.

  ‘I’ll tell you why,’ she said. ‘To squeeze you out. To make sure you don’t get any kind of position again. To make people think you are incompetent. So that if you decide to spill the beans, they can say, well, he’s just pissed off, isn’t he? Got promoted beyond his abilities. Can’t accept his own limitations. Disgruntled employee out for revenge. Who’s the world going to believe then?’ After a minute or two she added harshly: ‘You should have sent that dossier to EarthForce straight away.’

  ‘But Burt’s already sent his medical notes to the EPA and EarthForce, for God’s sake. And EarthForce are pressuring the EPA.’

  ‘Burt’s just a local physician. It’s only his opinion. It’s not the same.’ She clicked her tongue and repeated: ‘You should have sent your dossier.’

  ‘But what would it add?’

  ‘Everything. The workers’ testimonials. The evidence about safety procedures.’

  ‘But they can get the testimonials direct.’

  ‘And the safety procedures? Since when will they be able to get that from another source?’

  ‘It doesn’t prove a lot …’

  She sighed impatiently. ‘God – really, John! Of course it proves a lot. If Morton-Kreiger are forced to explain away this sickness, they may try to nail it on lax production-line procedures. While you – you – know damn well that the procedures were totally okay. Of course it proves something.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Anne gave a small grunt of derision and rolled away, turning her back on him, filling the space with one of her expressive silences.

  Dublensky thought with a tremor of guilt of the other file, the one that Anne wasn’t even aware of, that contained some of the Silveron toxicology results, and the fire which it would bring down on their heads if it were ever published. He had hoped never to have to use it; he hadn’t been ready to face those sorts of consequences.

  ‘I could still send them a dossier,’ he offered.

  ‘Oh, yeah? Now?’ Anne retorted. ‘And confirm what Morton-Kreiger are going to say about you? That you’re just doing it because you’re pissed off? That it’s simply a case of sour grapes because you can’t get another job? Th
at would look great. I told you, I told you right at the beginning, you should have sent it straight away.’

  ‘I thought I’d never get a job if I did.’

  ‘Well, you’re not getting a job anyway, so what’s the difference? Jesus, John, what was it all for, if it wasn’t to get this thing out into the open?’

  Over the next days a wretchedness clung to Dublensky. Though Anne said no more, her words prowled reproachfully around his mind, nibbling at his conscience.

  Even as he sat at the foot of Tad’s bed in the evening, reading aloud from Kidnapped, he thought about what she had said. He managed the trick of reading one thing and thinking quite another until he came to some Scots dialect and had to pause and concentrate. His accent slipped from what may have been Irish to what sounded like Italian. Even if it had by some miracle bordered on Scots, he had no means of knowing. He glanced over his spectacles to find Tad hiding his laughter behind the bed covers.

  ‘Okay,’ Dublensky said with good humour. ‘You try it.’

  ‘No, Dad, you’re great. Really. Go on, please.’ A last giggle, then a straight face.

  Dublensky found that he was staring unseeing at the page. He blinked himself back to reality. ‘You enjoying this?’ he asked doubtfully.

  ‘Sure. It’s good.’

  ‘It is?’ Dublensky realized he had taken in nothing of the last ten minutes’ reading.

  Grasping the situation, Tad explained: ‘Davie Balfour and Alan Breck have escaped the redcoats and are making for Ben Alder and the Pass of – ’

  ‘Who’s Ben Alder?’

  ‘Not who – what. It’s a mountain.’

  ‘Oh. And it’s important they reach it?’

  ‘It’s a place on their escape route.’

  Dublensky frowned. ‘I thought Alan Breck was the bad guy.’

  Tad gave the sort of impatient sigh that children reserve for parents who are being particularly dumb. ‘No, Dad. He’s one of the good guys.’

  ‘I thought he was involved in that shooting.’

  ‘He was, sort of. But the guy who died was a traitor, siding with the English, so it didn’t matter.’

  ‘Didn’t matter?’

  ‘No,’ Tad replied with exaggerated patience. ‘The English are the bad guys, right? The ones who’re down on the Scots. Alan Breck’s with the Scots, fighting for freedom. Against the English,’ he added just in case his father still hadn’t got it. ‘Anyway,’ he said with a certain logic, ‘you can tell Alan Breck’s a good guy because he gets the good lines.’

  ‘That makes him okay?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘Isn’t he a rascal, or whatever they used to call them?’

  ‘Oh, sure. But he has to do what he has to do, right? And if that includes a few bad things – well, it’s okay, isn’t it, when he’s got right on his side.’

  Dublensky nodded slowly. ‘I guess so.’ And with that he lost whatever concentration he might have had, and put the book away.

  The next day he sent a digest of the Aurora dossier to EarthForce. He did it cautiously – that is, anonymously and via his brother in New York, so it wouldn’t have an Allentown postmark. He enclosed a covering note, briefly explaining the significance of the information, and would have left it totally unsigned except for a nagging reluctance to cut himself totally off from the prospective custodians of this, his precious and costly information. At the very least he wanted to be able to check that they’d received and understood it and, to do that, he needed a means of identifying himself. Feeling like a character out of a spy movie, he thought up a name and typed it at the bottom of the page. He chose the name Kalisz, after the city in Poland where his mother was born, then almost immediately thought better of it. It was pretty stupid to use a place name with which he had a connection, however tenuous. He briefly considered using an anagram of Tad and Anne’s names, but rejected that for the same reason. Thinking of Tad, the answer suddenly came to him and he went upstairs to find the copy of Kidnapped.

  An eighteenth-century rascal courtesy of Robert Louis Stevenson; you couldn’t find a more remote connection than that. He reprinted the covering letter and signed it Alan Breck.

  At the last moment, infused with a sudden gust of courage that had him shivering somewhere between exhilaration and fear, he added a postscript. There is also something seriously wrong with the original toxicology data. Some of it was faked. I have the evidence.

  He hurried to the post before he could change his mind. Then he went and sat in the yard in the sunshine, and, closing his eyes very tight, let the light fall on his face.

  Chapter 16

  ‘YOU’RE SURE THIS is it?’ Daisy asked, surveying the wide expanse of rough grass.

  Campbell leant an arm on the gate. ‘Aye,’ he grunted laconically. ‘It’s the place.’

  The field seemed large enough and reasonably flat if you ignored the slight rise in the centre which hid the far right-hand boundary. But the ground was neither smooth nor firm. There was a quagmire fanning out from the gate, and, spreading into the distance, a progression of grassy tussocks interspersed with puddles. ‘It’s rather waterlogged,’ she ventured.

  ‘It’s dry enough over there.’ Campbell gestured towards the centre. ‘You could land a jetliner.’

  She shot him a glance but it was quite impossible to tell whether he was joking. ‘You said there was an access road?’

  He pointed towards the left, where a rough road was visible through a ragged boundary hedge. Some way up there was a wide opening in the hedge which led to what looked like a parking area just inside the field. Tucked in beside the hedge was a Portakabin, grey and weather-beaten, so that it blended perfectly with the landscape.

  ‘Shall we get on then?’ she said, aware that the morning was slipping away and that she would have to catch the four o’clock train if she was going to get back to London that evening. Officially – which meant for Alan’s benefit – she wasn’t here at all, but working flat out on a fund-raising campaign proposal due for presentation to Catch’s executive committee the day after tomorrow. And she had been working on it, very hard, until Campbell’s call had caused her to drop everything and jump on the night sleeper.

  Campbell’s unearthing of the airfield had sounded so very promising – an airfield would surely be thick with information on planes and flying companies – but now as she climbed into Campbell’s battered Ford she reflected on what he had brought her hurrying all this way to see. A long-abandoned airstrip devoid of people and information. A possible interview with the field’s owner who, since he wasn’t expecting them, might well slam the door in their faces.

  She had only herself to blame; too impulsive by half, too easily persuaded, too optimistic. Wasn’t that what Alan was always telling her?

  Campbell negotiated the car backwards onto the narrow lane, and they started off again. The inside of the car was like a fridge and, still frail from a heavy cold, she leant forward and twiddled with the heating controls.

  ‘Too warm for you?’ Campbell asked, rapidly winding his window down.

  She stared at him.

  ‘Not cold?’

  ‘Well – a little.’

  He grunted and, attacking the window again, closed it, though not, she noticed, right to the top.

  ‘You work out of doors, do you?’ she asked, blowing her nose.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Forestry?’

  ‘Fisheries.’

  ‘A fisherman?’

  ‘No.’

  She wondered if this terseness was habitual.

  ‘What then?’ she persevered.

  ‘Work on a salmon farm. Top of the loch.’

  ‘Ah. A large farm? Successful?’

  ‘Does well enough. But the fish …’ He shook his head briefly. ‘They dinna’ compare.’

  ‘To – ?’

  ‘Och, the wild fish.’

  They came round a bend and saw an open gateway and a sign for Auldhame Farm. If the name Auldhame conjure
d up a picture of a quaint dwelling with whitewashed walls and dormer windows, the impression was soon dispelled by the austere greystone house that came into view as they turned in through the gate. The front yard was muddy and rutted with tractor tracks. In a decrepit outbuilding with a tattered metal roof a number of vehicles were rusting quietly. As the car came to a halt, a black mongrel raced from the outbuilding and, flinging itself to the limits of its chain, snarled and snapped at the empty air.

  ‘Friendly place,’ Daisy remarked. Picking her way through the mud, she followed Campbell to the grey-painted front door. Campbell rapped vigorously. The dog kept up its frenetic baying and from an open-sided barn on the far side of the yard, beyond a metal-bar fence, a morose-looking cow gave a mournful bellow. The front door remained unanswered.

  ‘No one home,’ Campbell remarked unnecessarily. ‘We could try again in a wee while. The man’ll likely be in for his dinner.’

  They climbed into the car and started back along the narrow lane.

  ‘Could take a look at that cabin,’ Campbell suggested.

  Daisy wished they could find something a little warmer to do. She could feel her throat swelling up and a small thread of pain worming its way through her sinus.

  ‘You wouldn’t close the window, would you?’ she asked.

  Reaching for the winder, Campbell gave a short grunt of amazement.

  ‘I’m soft,’ Daisy said. ‘I admit everything.’

  ‘Aye, you’d never last up here, that’s for certain.’

  They came to the access road and turned into it. Reaching the break in the hedge that they had seen from the lane, they drove into the field and onto a large concrete apron sprouting rectangles of weeds. Ahead lay the retreating ribbon of the airstrip, an avenue of smoother grass. On the edge of the apron and roughly three yards out from the hedge was the Portakabin. To one side, a clutter of bricks, wood, chipboard and assorted debris in various stages of decomposition lay in an untidy heap. A couple of oil drums sat under the hedge, a rusting storage tank stood on stilts close to the road and, at the far end of the cabin and partly hidden by it, there was a small wooden hut.