Berserk (3 page)

Tom took a swig of beer, looked around the bar at the people who all meant nothing to him, and space closed in. He and King could have been sitting anywhere. “You see what I’m trying to say, Nathan? About how much I loved my son? I loved him so much I could live through him, and still there wasn’t an ounce of jealousy in me. I really, really loved him.” He broke off, swallowed hard, waiting for his stinging eyes to clear.

“My parents were never bothered with what I did, so long as I left home,” King said. “You must have been a good dad.”

“I hope Steven thought that way,” Tom said, nodding. “I hope he did. Anyway . . . the exercise. It was a long three weeks for my wife and me. We knew he said he’d be out of contact, but still we waited for the phone to ring, or someone to knock on the door. It’s crazy, but you never stop worrying about your children, even when they’re adults. There’s always something of the child to them in your eyes. Do you know what I mean? Do you have children?” Tom knew the answer even as he asked, and Nathan shook his head.

“Haven’t found the right woman yet,” King said.

“Good luck to you. Steven left his girlfriend when he joined up, and as far as I know there was nothing serious for the last years of his life. I guess he was living it up, a man in uniform enjoying the attention. Something else I never did . . . never played the field. Sounds mad, but that’s another thing I’m glad he did. Had fun.”

“So what happened?” King asked, a note of impatience creeping in.

“The accident.” Tom drained his beer. Through the bottom of his glass the bar seemed even further away, as if he could close his eyes and wish himself home. “They waited until the end of the exercise to tell us. It happened during the second week apparently, but they waited another week until calling, and by then . . . by then his body was already being shipped to us. How fucking cold, you know? Icy cold. Even the officer’s voice on the phone was hard, however much he tried to project sympathy.”

“They said Steven had been in an armoured troop carrier, out on its own, travelling across the Plain. There were fifteen men in there, including the driver, and they’d just stopped beside a copse of trees when a Tornado fired a missile at them. The pilot thought they were one of the targets set up across the Plain for the RAF to practise bombing. They killed everyone, all fifteen men. And that’s it, that’s all they said. Apart from sorry. As if sorry is ever any good!” Tom grabbed his glass, realised it was empty, and when he looked across at King he squeezed hard, feeling the of a crack beneath his fingers. “What is it?”
click

King had turned pale, and was staring down at his hands in his lap. There was sweat on his upper lip. When he looked up, Tom thought he was going to leave.

“What?” Tom asked again.

“Tom, I’m going to get another drink,” he said, and when he picked up his glass his hand was shaking.

For the couple of minutes King was away Tom’s mind ran riot, trying to imagine who he could be and what secrets he had to reveal. Was he a survivor? Did he know that lies had been told, and if so what they were? Was he the pilot who had fired the missile? Who, what, when, where . . . ?

Tom closed his eyes to try and calm himself, prepare for whatever revelation may come.
I won’t tell Jo,
he thought, surprising himself with his own conviction.
If it doesn’t change anything, I won’t tell her. She’s suffered enough.

King placed another pint in front of him, sat down and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. He rushed his words, as if afraid that they would dry up. “Tom, your son wasn’t killed in that accident. That never happened. Fifteen men died, but they died at Porton Down, not on Salisbury Plain.”

“Porton Down,” Tom said, guts clenching, skin running cold. “The chemical and biological research place. Steven was involved there?”

“No,” King said, sighing and looking down at his feet. “He was there on a trial period as a guard, that’s all. But wasn’t even involved in that exercise on the Plain.” He stayed that way for several seconds, tensed with some inner turmoil. When he looked up again, his eyes had gone hard. “I’ve said too much already,” he said.

“Don’t you fucking dare!” Tom hissed, leaning in so that their faces were a head apart. “Don’t you even
think
about starting this and not finishing it! Do you know what I’ve been through since it happened? The doubt, the suspicion? And now that you’ve told me everything we thought is wrong, you can’t just fuck off without telling me
how
wrong!”

“So . . . ?” Tom asked, and he thought, should
maybe he
leave, maybe he
shouldn’t
tell me.

“So . . . there was an accident at Porton Down. Your son and those others were there, and they were killed. And the Army whitewashed it. Made it into something it wasn’t. Hushed it up. Believe me, they’re good at that kind of thing.”

“What sort of accident?”

King looked into his beer. “Something escaped.”

“So what did I bury?” Tom asked, suddenly certain that the coffin he and Jo had wept over had not been filled with anything to do with them.

“Sod from the marshes. They buried the dead on the Plain. They didn’t want the infection to spread.”

“What sort of infection? Plague? What?”

“A plague of sorts,” King said. He finished his drink in two gulps, looked around, twitchy. Tom realised that he would be leaving soon, and there was nothing Tom could do to stop him. King already knew he had said too much. But this was still a story without an ending, and Tom could not live with this mystery anymore.

“How do you know all this?” Tom asked.

“I was at Porton Down too,” King said. “I had to bury the bodies.”

Bury the bodies.
Tom closed his eyes and tried not to imagine his son’s rotten body, flopping around in the bucket of an excavator with a younger Nathan King at the controls.

“Where’s my son’s grave?” he asked, eyes still closed.

“Tom, you’ll never—”

“Where is my son’s grave? Nathan, I need to tell you something. I’ve mourned for ten years, and I’ll mourn until the day I die. What you told me bears up what I’ve always believed: that we were lied to. But I don’t see what I can do about it, other than visit my son one last time. I’ve spent too long crying over an empty grave.”
And there’s more I can do,
he thought,
so much more. But not here and not now
. . .
I have to think first. Make plans.

“Don’t go looking,” King said, standing. “I saw the bodies. And I know the truth.”

“What truth?” Tom asked, and then the comment he had heard the previous day came back to him just as King spoke.

“They kept monsters there,” he said. And before Tom could hit him with any more questions King had left the pub and disappeared into the night.

Something escaped,
the ex-Army man had said.
A plague of sorts. They kept monsters there
. . .

Tom sat at the table for a long time, staring into the murk of the pub and seeing so much further, to the moors, to Salisbury Plain. Though he saw there, its true form was blurred by lies.
something

But now that the seed of truth had been planted, Tom needed to see it bloom.

CHAPTER TWO

When Tom and Jo left home for their journey to Wiltshire, it felt as though they were going for more than a long weekend. Tom checked that the doors and windows were locked, set the answerphone, unplugged the TV and stereo, closed all the internal doors . . . and he felt as though he should be laying white dust sheets over the furniture.
Only three days,
he thought, taking one last look around the living room, noticing some of it instead of just seeing it. The picture of them on their wedding day, with such a promising future evident in their happy smiles. And Steven, photographed at the parade to mark the end of his basic training, with that same potential future reflected in his eyes.
Nobody expects catastrophe,
Tom thought.
Everyone knows it’s coming at some point, but nobody expects it. We just can’t live like that. But that makes it so much harder when it arrives.

Tom wiped the dust from Steven’s picture and smiled, and a peculiar thought came to him unbidden.
Coming to see you, son.

Tom winced at her choice of words. “Jo, we’ve agreed that we’ll go, and I think it’s the right thing to do. Really. Besides, it’ll be good to get away. Steven will be on our minds, but it’ll be a break for us too. A break from everything.”

* * *

They were silent for most of the journey. Jo made occasional comments – pointing out a hovering sparrow hawk, an air balloon, asking Tom whether he wanted some mints – and Tom answered briefly, with a yes or a no, or sometimes with a nod or a shake of the head. It was not because he did not wish to talk, nor even because he knew that Jo really only wanted to sit there and think about the coming weekend. His silence was borne mainly of frustration.

In his back pocket sat the envelope he had found shoved beneath a windscreen wiper blade when he had been loading the car. He had not yet had a chance to open it without Jo seeing. And he had a feeling – a – that whatever it contained he would not want to share with her.
certainty

He must have waited outside the pub, followed me home.

“Shouldn’t be long now,” Jo said. Tom nodded.

Couldn’t finish the story face-to-face, and now it’s there in my back pocket, more hints at the truth.

“It’s been a long time since we were down this way.”

Tom was certain the envelope was from Nathan King. Anything else would be a huge coincidence, and a cruel one.

The miles swept by and Jo nodded off. The envelope burned in his trouser pocket.
Read me, read me.
He even began to reach into his pocket, but the car drifted into the next lane and the blare of a lorry’s horn startled him back to awareness.

Don’t feel fine. Feel fucked.

The motorway filtered down to dual carriageway, then they turned onto an A-road, and then B-roads led through startlingly beautiful countryside to the village where they were staying.

Not far from here,
Tom thought.
Not far from here at all.

After a few minutes they pulled up in the driveway to their holiday cottage.

“You check out the box in the shed where they said they’d leave the keys,” Tom said. “I’ll start unloading the car.”

As soon as Jo’s back was turned Tom pulled out the envelope, and though there was no writing in the clear window, Tom’s name had been scrawled across the front in red ink. Whoever had written his name had pushed so hard that the pen had torn the paper, like a cut in pale flesh. He ripped it open, glanced at Jo disappearing around the side of the cottage, and pulled out the sheet of folded paper.

It was a map, an enlarged OS section of part of Salisbury Plain. And near the centre, away from any distinguishing features, sat a small, neat ‘X’. It was marked in red. There was nothing else, but no explanation was needed.

“X marks the spot,” Tom whispered, and then he heard Jo’s footsteps in the gravel behind him, and he crumpled the map and envelope in his hand.

“Lovely cottage,” he said, even though this was the first time he had even glanced at it.

“Don’t break your back unloading the car, will you?”

Tom smacked Jo’s butt as she walked by, delighted at her giggle, already wondering how he could get away on his own for a few hours.

* * *

After unloading the car they had a look around the cottage together. It was small, cosy and very countrified, with plates lining walls, dried twigs stacked on windowsills and arranged in an old china pot, and dozens of landscape prints by local artists gracing the walls upstairs. The bath was an old, cast-iron freestanding type, great chunky pipes standing proud off the floor at one end like the exposed arteries of the house. The toilet would not have looked out of place in a museum. The air was musty with age, and although Tom spotted air fresheners secreted in several places upstairs and down, he thought they were fighting a losing battle. This house was old – maybe three hundred years – and it would take more than a few modern chemicals to purge the tang of its history from the air. It had stood for a long time, and it had a right to project its age. He breathed in deeply and enjoyed the aroma, smiling at Jo when she gave him a quizzical look.

From the kitchen a low door revealed an impossibly narrow staircase that led down to the cold room. Jo declined Tom’s offer to investigate, but he had always been one for exploring hidden places. It was that idea of never quite knowing what he would find: an old painting in the attic, a forgotten master; a half-buried chest in a seaside cave, the padlock a rusted remnant from centuries before. He never had found anything of value, but that did not deter him. In fact, it encouraged him to explore further, because really it was the mystery that lured him on. If he ever did find something other than darkness and empty spaces, the mystery would dissipate, and perhaps he would change.