Deception (8 page)

‘
Not much of a story. The police got there before the buggers could set fire to the crop like they’d planned.’

‘
You sound disappointed.’

‘
One man’s misfortune is another’s front page story,’ said McColl. ‘You’re a stranger here; what line are you in?’

‘
I’m a civil servant.’

‘
Another one? Place is crawling with them. How come you’re not drinking with your mates up at the Arms?’

‘
I’ve just arrived. I don’t know my way about yet. This was the first place I came to. How come you’re not there if it’s a story you’re after?’

‘
I got seriously fed up banging my head against a brick wall. Getting the knickers off a nun would be easier than getting information out of that lot. The beer’s cheaper here too.’

A newcomer arrived at the bar beside them. ‘Bloody hell, it’s raining cats and dogs out there,’ a tall, gangling man complained, shaking the water from his thatch of dark hair and brushing it from the shoulders of his Berghaus jacket. Steven thought he spoke with an English accent but further exposure to it said it was educated Scots.

‘
Well, well, if it isn’t young Jamie Brown of, The Scotsman,’ said McColl. ‘The paper for people who need a tyre lever to open their arse in the morning. Someone else who’s lost his way in the storm, I’ll be bound.’

‘
Hello McColl,’ replied Brown pleasantly. ‘I suppose you’re here running a competition to find out if you’ve any readers who can actually spell, “genetically modified”. Wins a trip to Disneyland, does it?’

‘
Ho, very droll,’ replied McColl. ‘That kind of joke in your column could well push your circulation up into double figures.’

‘
In which case I will buy some proper toilet paper and stop using copies of the Clarion.’

‘
Well, enough of this jolly banter,’ said McColl, buttoning up his jacket. ‘I’m off to see if I can coax a few quotes out of Thomas Rafferty, the people’s champion. They tell me he’s a piss artist so it shouldn’t be too difficult with a bottle of malt in my pocket.’

‘
Good luck,’ said Brown sourly. ‘I’ve just come from there. That’s how I got soaked. I’ve been arguing with his minders for the last half hour.’

‘
Minders?’ exclaimed McColl. ‘What the hell does Rafferty need minders for? It’s an organic farm he’s supposed to be setting up not a Swiss bank.’

Brown shrugged. ‘Good question, but there were two men in suits at Crawhill, insisting that, “Mr Rafferty had nothing to say to the press”.’

McColl left to go try his luck, leaving Steven and Brown at the bar. ‘Can I get you a drink?’ Steven offered.

‘
Civil of you. I’ll have a whisky if that’s all right.’

Steven ordered the drink and watched Brown add a little water to it from a jug on the bar. The water in the jug made him think of the canal.

‘
You’re English,’ said Brown. ‘Welcome to Blackbridge . . . twinned with Auschwitz,’ he whispered quietly.

‘
It’s not exactly pretty, is it?’ answered Steven.

‘
West Lothian does these places really well,’ said Brown. ‘It has lots of them.’

Steven said, ‘Your colleague was just bemoaning the fact that this GM business wasn’t much of a story.’

‘
Well, it’s not exactly new, is it? It’s been happening all over the place down south but I suppose we have to cover it up here when it happens on our own doorstep.’ Brown looked about him before saying,
sotto voce
, ‘Mind you, I tend to think a few foreign elements getting into the gene pool round here might be a welcome development. Half these buggers look like they should be playing the banjo on some bridge.’

Steven hid a smile. He thought the barman might have heard but either didn’t understand or was pretending not to.

An argument at one of the tables was gathering momentum. Voices were getting louder by the second. The barman tried, ‘Order please, gentlemen!’ but to no avail. The table was now the centre of attention.

‘
Ah’m tellin’ you, Lane has a perfect right to protect his property, any way he chooses,’ said one man loudly.

‘
An’ ah’m tellin’ you, we’re all breathin’ in that GM crap he’s growin’ up there on Peat Ridge. He can bring in a’ the security guards he wants but it’s still no’ goin’ tae stop us torchin’ that shit!’

‘
Christ, the man’s got a license. There’s nothin’ wrang wi’ the stuff he’s growin’ He wouldn’t have got the license if there was!’

‘
What’s the bugger doin’ back here anyway? South African tosser,’ interjected another loud voice.

‘
He was bloody born here! He’s got every right to be here! It was his faither’s place!’

‘
But it was never good enough for mister university high and mighty while his old man was alive. He pissed off and left the old guy to work the place on his own ‘til it killed him. He should have fuckin’ stayed away.’

‘
Gus is right,’ said yet another new voice. ‘Nobody seems to know what that bugger is growin’ up there and lots of us have got young kids. Christ knows what a’ they genes floatin’ aboot are doin’ tae them.’

‘
Jesus! It’s oilseed rape, he’s growin’. You can see that for yersels. The only difference is that it’s resistant tae weed killers so it’s easier tae get a bigger yield. ’

‘
So the bugger says.’

‘
Even the government are no’ convinced o’ that.’

Steven and Brown watched and listened until one of the men in the group surrounding the main protagonists nudged those on either side of him and nodded in the direction of the bar. It was obvious he was warning them of the presence of strangers.

‘
Woops,’ said Brown under his breath, turning away as attention swung towards him and Steven. Steven turned his shoulder a little as well and both men took a sip of their drink. The argument and threats continued but in quieter voices.

‘
I might get a story out of this yet,’ murmured Brown. ‘Sounds like Lane’s dogs have arrived.’

‘
They have,’ Steven confirmed. ‘I met one on my way here. Sector One Security was holding the lead. Mean anything to you?’

‘
I’ve seen them around.’

A few minutes later, a youth, wearing leather jacket and jeans and holding a pool cue sidled across to them and stopped, facing them. Standing legs apart, he brought the cue to the horizontal and held it in both hands at arms’ length across his thighs. He said, ‘I hope you two aren’t thinking of printing anything you’ve heard here today, are you?’

‘
Nope, ‘replied Steven quickly and truthfully and with an almost jaunty air. He did it to nullify the air of menace that the youth obviously hoped he was imparting.

‘
Shouldn’t think so,’ drawled Brown, matter of factly.

The youth betrayed a look of puzzlement for a moment. He’d got the response he wanted but was finding it strangely unsatisfying. He’d been cheated of something but couldn’t think what it was. He moved off with Steven and Brown watching his back.

‘
Marlon Brando,’ said Steven.

‘
In, “On the Waterfront”,’ added Brown.

They turned back to their drinks. ‘You didn’t say what you were doing here?’ asked Brown.

‘
I’m a civil servant.’

‘
Is that it?’

‘
Matters concerning the environment,’ said Steven vaguely.

‘
Are you one of the people who’s going to decide whether Lane’s crop gets the red card or not?’

‘
I’m not important enough to make that kind of decision. What do you think about it all?’ replied Steven.

‘
If he’s really growing a crop the company weren’t licensed for then certainly I think a stop should be put to it. There’s no point in having a licensing system if the company’s going to get away with that sort of nonsense. But the trouble is it’s proving really hard to find out if he is or if he isn’t. You can never get anyone in authority to give you a straight answer to a simple question. I got fed up asking the local suits and briefcases so I tried phoning the lab that carried out the analysis, but I hit the same wall. Getting information out of them was like drawing teeth.’

‘
If you say absolutely nothing to the press you can never get into trouble,’ said Steven. ‘It’s the way people look after their pensions in the civil service.’

‘
Can I quote you on that?’ smiled Brown.

‘
I’d rather you didn’t.’

‘
As for this organic farm business at Crawhill, it’s just too bizarre for words. I haven’t spoken to a soul in the village who believes that Thomas Rafferty is the least bit interested in organic farming – or any kind of farming come to that. By all accounts he’s a waster who’s been making a living out of hiring out farm machinery. For years his only other recorded interest has been in pissing large quantities of lager against the wall, so much so that I heard his wife left him recently.’

‘
Maybe he’s thinking of selling up,’ suggested Steven. ‘Maybe he’s trying to turn the farm into a going concern to make it more attractive to prospective buyers?’

‘
That’s possible, I suppose,’ said Brown thoughtfully. ‘In fact, I hadn’t thought of that angle. So why won’t he speak to the press? You’d think he’d want all the favourable publicity he could get. We’ve got a ready-made villain in Lane so Rafferty would seem well placed for the starring roll of organic-growing hero. And where do the minders come in?’

Steven shrugged. ‘Could be the Magnificent Seven,’ he said, ‘come to aid the poor peasant farmer?

‘
There were only two.’

Steven gave Brown a sideways glance and saw that he was preoccupied, not stupid.

‘
The first thing I’m going to do when I leave here is run a check to see if Crawhill has been put on the market,’ said Brown. ‘That was a good idea of yours. Would you like to be informed of the result?’

‘
If you like,’ said Steven. He gave Brown his mobile telephone number.

‘
If this works out, I’ll owe you a bottle of Scotch.’

Steven had had an even better idea but was keeping it to himself for the time being. It proposed that Rafferty had already sold the farm and was acting as some kind of front for the new owners. That might well explain the presence of the people Brown had described as minders but also begged the question as to why the new owners needed a front man at all. The obvious answer to that was that they didn’t want anyone to know who they were. Steven worked the idea through to a conclusion. Why not? Because . . . it would be embarrassing for them? Why embarrassing? Because . . . the new owners were not private buyers at all. They were . . . corporate buyers. They were . . . a commercial company. They were . . . a biotech company! A rival biotech company to Agrigene!

That would make a lot of sense, Steven thought as he continued to work on the hypothesis. They move in to the area and buy the farm next door to their competitor; then they manage to get an organic farm accreditation. It would give them the perfect basis for courting public sympathy while causing trouble for Agrigene and screwing up their experimental programme.’

‘
What kind of a civil servant are you exactly?’ asked Brown.

‘
A thirsty one,’ replied Steven.

Brown ordered two more drinks and Steven made vague noises about liasing with the new Scottish Parliament over environmental concerns. Inside, he was thinking that this theory about Crawhill might also explain where the protestors were getting the money from for lawyers and independent crop analysis. It didn’t explain however, how they had managed to get organic accreditation so easily or why the crop analysis they’d obtained was so scientifically vague,

‘
So you’re with the MAFF people up here,’ said Brown. ‘Or are you with the new Scottish parliament lot?’

‘
Neither really,’ replied Steven. ‘I’m here to assess if anything should cause concern to the Department of the Environment but I understand that MAFF have everything under control.’

‘
You could have fooled me,’ said Brown.

‘
Why d’you say that?’

‘
You’ve just heard the local mood for yourself,’ said Brown with a nod to the table behind him. ‘The locals are planning civil war by the sound of it and MAFF and the Scottish Executive are sitting on their arses along the road, arguing the legal niceties over who’s responsible for what.’

‘
But they must have had meetings with the community?’ said Steven.

‘
One of their chaps gave a talk to the locals in the village hall saying that they were currently looking into discrepancies in the licensing agreement up at Lane’s place. That’s the last I heard.’

‘
The legal wrangle’s still going on,’ said Steven.

‘
I wish to God, they’d keep people informed,’ said Brown. ‘There’s nothing rumour likes better than a vacuum.’

Steven silently agreed.

The conversation was over but Brown was delayed in leaving by a man coming in through the doors of the pub and standing there as if about to make an announcement. As if by magic a hush fell on the place and the man in the doorway said, ‘The Ferguson boy’s dead. ‘Died this morning in St John’s Hospital. His mum and dad were with him, poor wee bugger.’

‘
I thought he was holding his own,’ said one man. ‘I thought the three of them were.’