Deception (38 page)

‘Sling your hook,’ said Trish angrily.

‘Wait!’ Steven showed her his ID and said, ‘I’m sorry but under law you are obliged to answer them either here or at police headquarters if you’d prefer.’

Trish stared at Steven, her eyes flashing and then looked at Brown. ‘And who’s he?’ she asked.

Brown introduced himself and Trish snorted. ‘There’s no bloody way that I’m obliged to speak to bloody reporters,’ she fumed.

‘No, you’re not,’ agreed Steven. ‘We can talk on a one to one basis if you prefer.’

‘You’d better come in.’

Trish said to Eve, ‘Look after this one, will you? See that he doesn’t pinch the silver while I talk to Sherlock here.’

Eve took Brown into the living room with an apologetic smile while Trish led Steven through to the dining room where they sat down at the table to talk.

Steven could see that Trish – arms folded across her chest, was in no mood to be co-operative so he said, ‘Let me tell you what I already know. That barn out there – he gestured with his forefinger – is full of BSE infected material. The local rats have been eating it and they have developed their own form of BSE that’s why they’ve been going around biting everyone. Your husband is responsible for that situation in some way and you shopped him to the authorities over it. You told them everything in exchange for a promise of immunity for him and his co-operation in what they’re doing here at the moment. How am I doing?’

Trish Rafferty had gone pale. She swallowed and said, ‘No comment.’

‘Won’t do.’ Said Steven. ‘I have to know the missing bits. What kind of a hold do Childs and Rafferty have over you?’

‘No comment.’

‘For God’s sake, woman, the Ferguson kid is dead; James Binnie is dead; your own husband is dead and all because of what’s been going on here. ‘Do you want to be an accessory to murder?’

‘They were accidents,’ insisted Trish.

‘James Binnie’s death was no accident and neither was your husband’s,’ said Steven, playing his ace. ‘Someone locked them in the shed with Khan and then doused the lights. Think about it, Trish!’

‘You’re lying!’ she stormed.

‘No, I’m not,’ said Steven calmly. ‘James Binnie had a friend at the vet school who told him exactly what was wrong with the rats. He came here to have it out with your husband and Childs and Leadbetter killed them both.’

Trish shook her head, unwilling to accept what she was hearing. ‘No,’ she said. ‘They promised me nothing would happen to Tom if he just did what they told him.’

‘Face facts, Trish,’ said Steven kindly. ‘They couldn’t afford to have someone like Tom keeping their secret, could they?’

All the aggression had gone from Trish Rafferty. Her shoulders slumped forward as she saw the truth in what Steven was saying. ‘The bastards,’ she murmured. ‘The bloody bastards. Tom was an arse but he didn’t deserve that.’

Steven kept quiet and was rewarded when Trish started to talk.

‘About eighteen months ago, Tom was approached by someone who said he was from the Scottish Office about the possibility of him storing some BSE cull material. They’d been killing cows faster than they could incinerate them in that bloody stupid gesture to placate Europe. They said that they’d pay well for the use of his barn. The only condition was that he would have to bring it up to standard with regard to it being wind and watertight and secure from animal ingress. He’d need to get a licence but not for a year. The barn was empty and the money was good so Tom agreed. He pretended to the locals that he was storing animal feed there while it was waiting for a Euro-licence.’

‘So it was all above board?’ said Steven.

‘Yes,’ agreed Trish. ‘It was all perfectly legal.’

Steven could see that Trish was having difficulty saying more. He tried prompting her. ‘So what went wrong, Trish? What did he do that was so awful that you had to blow the whistle on him?’

Trish took out her handkerchief to hold it over her nose and mouth for a moment.

‘What was it?’ prompted Steven. ‘He didn’t bring the building up to scratch as he’d agreed, so the rats got in and started eating the stuff?’

‘Not just that,’ said Trish. ‘The stuff looked just like animal feed so he started selling the stuff on the black market.’

‘What!’ said Steven, his eyes opening wide. ‘But that could have started the whole BSE business all over again!’

Trish nodded. ‘I tried telling him that. I argued with him until I was blue in the face and he promised he’d stop but I knew he was still doing it so I went to the authorities and told them what he was doing.’

‘What happened?’

‘At first they were going to lock Tom up and melt the key but then they realised what the publicity would do to them personally. They changed their minds and decided that it would be wrong to cause public panic. If Tom and I would cooperate they would put everything right and in exchange for our help, no action would be taken against Tom. I said that I wanted no more to do with any of it, including Tom and they agreed that I could move out. Tom could do their bidding on his own.

‘That’s when Childs and Leadbetter came on the scene and the organic farm business was born.’

Trish nodded.

‘So what are they actually doing here?’ asked Steven.

‘I don’t know,’ replied Trish. ‘I just know that they’ve been taking measurements around the place and digging up samples of the soil in various places around the farm but I think that’s just them keeping up the pretence of the organic business.’

Steven looked at her, trying to decide whether she knew any more or not. He decided that she’d told him all she could.

‘What happens now?’ asked Trish quietly.

‘I’m not sure,’ said Steven. ‘Childs and Leadbetter have been up to something tonight and I think tomorrow’s Clarion will tell us what it was. Maybe then I’ll see what the end-game is. Don’t tell them about our conversation, will you?’

Trish shook her head. As they rose to rejoin the others, she asked, ‘Can you prove that they murdered Tom?’

‘No,’ replied Steven. ‘But I know they did.’

Eve put her arm round Trish when they entered the living room and ushered her to a chair, saying that she would make some tea. She threw an accusing look at Steven who shrugged his shoulders in reply. ‘We’ll be going now,’ he said.

‘See yourselves out, won’t you,’ said Eve coldly.

‘Well, what happened?’ asked Brown as soon as the door had closed behind them.

‘The barn does contain BSE infected material but it’s not feedstuffs: it’s rendered cow carcasses. Trish insists that it was all quite legal but that needs checking out. I need you to find out everything you can about BSE cull material and what the government says happened to it.’

‘Cull material?’ said Brown. ‘I thought they burned the carcasses.’

‘That’s what I thought too,’ said Steven.

‘I’ll get on to that first thing in the morning,’ said Brown.

‘No!’ said Steven. ‘Tonight. Stay up all night if you have to.’

Brown looked at Steven to see that he was serious and saw that he was. Well, I suppose I’d just be lying awake wondering what McColl’s going to come up with,’ he said.

Steven drove Brown up to The Scotsman Offices in North Bridge, Edinburgh and dropped him there.

‘I’ll call you as soon as I have it,’ said Brown.

Brown phoned at five am. ‘Did I wake you? Good. I’d hate to think I was the only one having fun.’

‘What did you get?’ asked Steven.

‘We were wrong about the carcasses being burned,’ said Brown. ‘That was the plan but apparently there was some kind of fuck-up over incineration capacity and the stuff has been building up ever since all over the UK. Basically, the carcasses were either put into cold storage or sent to rendering plants where they were turned into a granular material and now it’s being stockpiled in a variety of storage facilities up and down the country.’

‘Any idea how much?’

‘There is currently a little over seventy-two thousand tons of the stuff being stored at two official sites in Scotland. They’ve only managed to dispose of eighteen thousand tons in the last three years and their best estimate says they’ll only manage to get rid of sixty percent of it by the end of 2002. At the moment it’s costing the tax payer over 1.3 million pounds a year to store it.’

‘So why don’t they burn more?’ asked Steven.

‘One, there aren’t enough incinerators, two they are privately owned so the owners can charge what they like and three, the owners don’t like burning that kind of stuff anyway. It makes a mess of their furnaces or something.’

‘You’ve done well,’ said Steven.

‘It was dead easy,’ said Brown. ‘An SNP member of the |Scottish parliament started giving the Minister for Rural Affairs a hard time over this in early summer. It’s all in the records.’

‘Why did he do that?’

‘The member claimed that there was a secret plan to start dumping a whole load of the stuff in a landfill site in the middle of his constituency and in contravention of a European agreement to burn the stuff. His constituents were up in arms and so was he. He managed to get an assurance from the minister that this would not happen and also made him cough up the figures on amounts and storage costs. I guess with the landfill plan in ruins, the pressure is on to find cheap alternative storage.’

‘But surely there must be security regulations about these storage facilities?’ said Steven.

‘Oh there are,’ agreed Brown. ‘But under the current regulations, storage facility owners are given a year’s grace. They don’t have to be licensed until that year has passed.’

‘
So Rafferty
was
operating the store legally,’ said Steven.

‘What’s legal and what’s sensible are often two very different things,’ said Brown.

‘And never more so than in this case,’ said Steven. ‘They’re going to finish up with enough egg on their face to promote National Omelette Week.’

TWENTY TWO

‘
You’d better try and get some sleep.’ suggested Steven.

‘
No way,’ replied Brown. ‘The special edition of the Clarion will be out soon. I want to get to it before my editor does. That way, I just might have enough time to come up with an excuse before I end up covering society weddings for Scottish Field.’

‘
Call me when you hear,’ said Steven. It seemed as if he had barely closed his eyes when Brown rang back, although it was now a quarter past seven. ‘It’s out,’ yelled Brown down the phone. ‘They’ve gone with the banner, LIARS! GOVERNMENT COVER-UP! Listen to this. “The Clarion’s ace reporter, Alex McColl, has uncovered a government plot to deceive the public by concealing the fact that rats in the Blackbridge area have undergone a behavioural change due to the presence of a genetically modified crop growing on Peat Ridge Farm. We can exclusively reveal that the death of local minister, Rev Thomas McNish was not due to drowning as stated in a post-mortem report released to the press but to a rat attack, which the authorities covered-up in order to prevent public panic. It is to be hoped that the Clarion’s timely campaign to curb the rat menace will prevent the nightmare problem of super-rats spreading to other areas of Scotland.” Then they announce a new campaign and begin with “An open message to the Scottish Executive.” It says, “STOP THE DITHERING AND STOP THE GM MENACE NOW!” Tell me this is a pile of crap?’

‘
It’s a pile of crap’ said Steven quietly. ‘Childs and Leadbetter set him up.’

‘
But why? To create a diversion?’ suggested Brown.

‘
No,’ said Steven thoughtfully. ‘It’s not a diversion they want to create . . . it’s a full scale riot.’

‘
But why?’

‘
I think that’s been their objective all along,’ said Steven, now seeing what was behind it. ‘They’ve been poisoning public opinion in the village against the GM trial from the beginning, carefully nursing fear and suspicion at every turn so that the locals would eventually be persuaded to take matters into their own hands. This story is them lighting the fuse.’

‘
So what’s going to happen now?’

‘
It’s my guess that, when the local hot-heads read this, they are going to march on Peat Ridge and burn the whole lot to the ground and God help anyone who gets in their way.’

‘
But how will that benefit, Childs and Leadbetter?’ asked Brown.

Everything was becoming clear in Steven’s head. He’d heard on various occasions that the two men spent their time taking measurements and sampling the soil on Crawhill. They hadn’t been doing that at all! They were explosive experts. He would now bet money that they had been planting incendiary devices at specific sites on the farm so that the fire on Peat Ridge would appear to spread to Crawhill. People would assume that the fire, aided by the prevailing west wind, would have spread naturally and the barn full of BSE material would go up in flames, leaving no evidence and therefore no embarrassing problem for the government. ‘The fire is going to spread to Crawhill,’ he replied.

‘
Of course!’ said Brown. ‘They’re going to get rid of the stuff and any residual problem with the rats will be blamed on the GM crop. You’ve got to admit, it has a certain beauty.’

‘
I’m going out there,’ said Steven.

‘
I’ll have to see my editor first,’ said Brown. ‘I’ll stroke his fevered brow and join you as soon as I can. I’ll bring a photographer. I want some shots of the stuff in Rafferty’s barn. With a bit of luck we can end up screwing the lot of them, including “ace reporter”, Alex McColl. That’ll teach him to check his facts first. Where will you be?’

‘
I’m going out to police headquarters first,’ said Steven. ‘I want to make sure they appreciate just what’s going to happen when Blackbridge reads the Clarion this morning. After that, I’ll just play it by ear.’