Experiment With Destiny (7 page)

             
“Jesus, you’re depressing me now!”

             
Steven sniggered. The picture was disappointing in its lack of detail. It was impossible to tell what type of vehicle it had once been – one of the drawbacks of digital ‘idiot boxes’ as they were dubbed, the resolution of professional snappers’ digital cameras much greater. Steven noted that the registration plate was out of focus and unreadable.

             
“What did the police say about the car involved?” He opened the second JPEG file. It was not much better. His heart began to sink. At least he had noted the registration number in his notebook – EBM 162G. And the pictures of the bodies, taken at close range, should be much clearer.

             
“What car? Oh…sorry. Hang on.”

             
There were three images of general wreckage, a policeman directing traffic and one of a paramedic helping an elderly woman from the buckled doorway of the bus. With a little PhotoShop know-how and ruthless cropping they would make publication.

             
“Here we go. 16.55. Friday. Serious RTA on the westbound carriageway of Western Avenue blah blah blah, Stagecoach bus with 26 passengers and an old type Jaguar petrol-engine saloon. Four dead…driver of the bus…driver of the car…two car passengers. Eight seriously injured, all bus passengers. All conveyed to the University Hospital of Wales. One minor injury treated at the scene, conveyed to Heath Hospital as a precaution.”

             
“That’s it? That’s all they said?” Steven wondered if the lack of reference to the government vehicle was because the information had not been released or because Menna had not bothered asking for any more detail. She was, after all, a junior.

             
“Pretty much. They said they’d be releasing the names of the deceased fairly quickly and we could find them on the press office website…round about…” Menna glanced up at the office clock. “…ten minutes from now.”

             
“That can’t be right. It usually takes them hours to contact next of kin and identify the bodies. I doubt if we’ll get the names tonight.”

             
“ID cards, retina scans, print scans. The coppers will have known who they were within minutes of arriving on the scene. And the bus company…” Menna was scowling.

             
“Yes, I know they will know who the victims were…but you know what the cops are like for double-checking, going through the proper channels, before giving us the names. We’ve had cases before where…” Steven suddenly realised why she was scowling. “Hey, look, I’m not doubting you were told…it’s just…it’s just very unusual, that’s all.” He turned back to the screen as the first grisly close-up filled the frame.

             
“Fucking hell!” Menna looked away.

             
“Yeah, sorry.” He quickly closed the file and thought better of opening the remaining two. “Bit of a mess. Had your tea yet?” he quipped.

             
“What the hell were you doing taking close-ups like that? We never use stuff like that!”

             
Steven knew she would never accept the invitation for a drink unless he could come up with a satisfactory excuse for his morbid photography but he was loathed to trust her with his real reason for taking the pictures. Menna had another six hours in which to dig around and there was a chance, however slim, her byline could be on tomorrow’s first edition front page exclusive splash about a Eurostate defence minister or high ranking officer’s sudden and tragic death.

             
“They’d use it on WWWdotCardiffCam!” There goes a good night out, he thought as she turned her shoulder toward him. “I guess I got carried away.” Shame, she was quite cute.

             
“You’re sick!” Menna continued typing the remainder of her hourly round-up and he momentarily pondered how much CardiffCam would pay for his gory pictures.

              Ten long and silent minutes later Steven was scrolling through the list of names on the police press office website when Jerry returned amid a teasing waft of freshly smoked tobacco and vinegar soaked chips.

             
“What you got for me then?” he demanded, his tone marginally less sharp for the benefit of a recent nicotine infusion. He stood over Steven’s shoulder and began unwrapping his chips, reminding Steven how long it had been since lunch.

             
“Not sure yet.” Steven clicked on the print icon and glanced across at Menna, who was ignoring them both. “Got a minute?”

             
“Sure,” Jerry mumbled through a mouthful of succulently fried potato.

             
“In private.” Steven’s voice was almost a whisper. Jerry gave him a quizzical look before pacing across to the conference room. Steven joined him, printout in hand, a minute later.

             
“What’s the big secret? You quitting? Found another job?” Jerry’s favourite paranoia, largely because he was usually blamed by those who did quit for making their lives a miserable overworked hell, and that didn’t go down well with the Investors in People obsessed editor.

             
“How’d you guess?” Steven waited long enough for the flash of indignation to pass and the worry to furrow Jerry’s brow. “No, nothing like that. It’s this RTA. The police have released the names of the four dead in record time. Trouble is the details they’ve released don’t match what I know from the scene.”

             
“Police cock-up. No problem. Menna can get onto it and they’ll have it sorted by tomorrow’s first edition.” Jerry eyed his chips longingly. “Just type up what you’ve got, caption your pix and get away. You’re off tomorrow, aren’t you?”

             
“Yes…no!” Steven flapped the printout in frustration. “I mean yes, I’m off, but no, I don’t think it’s a police cock-up. It’s starting to look more…sinister than that.” Jerry cocked an eyebrow, his wooden fork hovering agonisingly close to a large vinegar-doused chip. “It was a government car…a black Jag, one of the old petrol limo types. It had EBM plates…military.”

             
“And they’ve released the names of the people inside? Remarkable!”

             
“That’s just it. According to this…” he waved the printout under Jerry’s nose. “…the three inside were vagrants…waste-dwellers.”

             
“Stolen car, obviously. It’s not unknown, though it must have taken some nerve for waste-dwellers to nick a military vehicle. Bet some MOD chauffeur’s had his arse seriously kicked for that!”

             
“The police say it was stolen, but the point I’m getting at is that the three people who died in it this evening were not the three people the police have named on this press release. Look!  ‘Driver, Timothy Allan Gillislade, aged 19, no fixed abode. Loss of Eurostate Citizenship in April. Category: unresponsive to correctional penalties. Pronounced DOA. Front seat passenger, Edward Ian Bessant, aged 21, no fixed abode. Loss of Eurostate Citizenship in July. Category: unresponsive to correctional penalties. Pronounced DOA.” Steven was quite animated by now.

             
“What are you getting at?” Jerry interrupted. “If you don’t mind, my chips are getting cold!” Steven glared at him momentarily, then instantly regretted his audacity.

             
“I took pictures of the three people they pulled out of that government car.” There was an effort of restraint in his voice.

             
“You did what?” Jerry’s voice was so loud that Menna was now paying attention to what was going on in the conference room, though it was unlikely she could make out what was being said with the door closed.

             
“I took pictures,” Steven continued more quietly, “because I figured whoever had died in that car was not going to be your average Joe Bloggs and because if we could identify whoever that person was ASAP we’d have a head start on a major story…”

             
“Good thinking…I think.” Jerry had forgotten his chips. “It was a public highway.”

             
“The bodies I took pictures of are not those of the non citizens named here. One was wearing some kind of uniform, another looked more like late forties, early fifties than 21!” Steven gestured at the printout again as Jerry’s chips were deferred to the conference table. “And they say the third victim was a Sally Redmountain, aged 22, no fixed abode, loss of citizenship through repeated drugs offences. The woman I saw was much older…well groomed, well dressed and certainly no waste-dweller.”

             
“Let me look at that!” Jerry snatched the printout. “You’ve got pictures, you say.”

             
“Yes, they’re on my desktop.”

              Jerry’s chips were stone cold by the time Steven left Thomson House for the weekend. It had been decided that Menna would type up the story according to the official police line, the picture of the paramedic aiding the walking wounded from the wrecked bus would be published alongside it. There were only two editions of the Echo on a Saturday – the first and the late extra – and Jerry had given him until Monday morning to dig around for more information about the real identities of the three bodies pulled from the ‘stolen’ government Jaguar.

             
“This could be a cracking yarn,” assured Jerry, slapping him heartily on the back. “Maybe a real big scoop. We can’t afford to jump to conclusions but something ain’t smelling too sweet about this.”

             
“I couldn’t hang on to the pool car over the weekend, could I?” Steven ventured, already knowing the answer.

             
“Bugger off! See you at seven, Monday. Now, where did I put my chips?”

             
Armed with his contacts book and printouts of the JPEG pictures, two of each, Steven made his way along the corridor, down the steps and out through the side lodge into the rain, acknowledging security as he passed. He was tired but excitedly happy. A story like this could provide the platform he needed to make the jump to television, maybe even to International News Broadcasting, the 24-hour state-funded digital news network forged from the ashes of the BBC. That would be an irony…earning a place as a roving reporter for Ted Hallder’s prime time Eurostate Today show on the strength of uncovering a government conspiracy.

             
“This is Steven Elan, reporting for Eurostate Today…” he rehearsed aloud.

             
It was only when he reached the bus station that the first major clue to his conspiracy mystery returned to his attention. It clanked in his coat pocket as he brushed against the neon-lit shelter as he waited for the 10.40pm service to Ely. He pulled it out and examined it in the orange-yellow neon glow. It was a round medal, perhaps made of brass. He remembered picking it up from the roadside where it lay among the sea of glass that had been a Jaguar’s front windscreen. One side bore a semi-relief of the Eurostate circle of twelve stars, each representing one of the federation’s founding member states. Inside the circle was a winged dagger and the words ‘Who Dares Wins’. The other side was inscribed with the words ‘Awarded for exceptional valour in the call of duty’ and then ‘Abamae’. Finally, there was a date – some 20 years had elapsed since this medal had been issued.

* * *

V

STEVEN Elan awoke to a cold flat and the sound of drilling from the road outside. The cold was something to do with the communal heating system being out of sync with Greenwich Mean Time and his landlord’s unfulfilled promises, dating back weeks, to get it sorted. The drilling, he guessed, was something to do with the cabling work for the new closed community opposite. A company called CyberVision was planning some kind of inner city ‘televillage’. He remembered reading about it months ago in the Echo. The story, not one of his, only caught his eye because the address was familiar. The thought of living opposite some high security commune of paranoid cyber geeks made him shudder…or was it the cold.

              He wrapped himself in the quilt from his bed before moving into the lounge/dining and kitchen area of his modest flat. His hair was dishevelled, like a blond Brillo pad, and his chin bristled with three days’ growth. He padded quickly across the icy floor tiles, wishing he had invested more effort trying to find his slippers, toward the electric kettle. Flicking it on, he scooped a generous spoonful of instant Earl Grey, ready sweetened with added milk granules, into a relatively clean mug. Its motif was ‘Facts times importance equals news’, a quote from some 20th century television satire on the media that had been completely lost on Jerry.

             
“Well, no. It’s people,” Jerry had painstakingly explained. “People equals new, not facts, however important.” Jerry didn’t have much of a grasp of satire. Humour for the old warhorse of a news editor revolved around life’s sick ironies. Health freaks dropping dead of heart attacks while jogging would make Jerry laugh, or paranoid cyber geeks with state-of-the-art security getting fried to death by their own computers. That was a real newsman’s humour.

             
Steven felt his eyelids sliding closed again as the sound of the kettle lulled him towards sleep. He searched the nearest armchair for the remote and flicked on the TV in a bid to wake up. There was a moment of electronic humming before brutal power chords ripped over a rabid drum machine’s beat, accompanied by the sight of some masked freak bellowing guttural noises into the microphone. It was too early on Saturday for MTV. He quickly flicked through the programmes until he found INB. The screen told him it was 09:21 and the local news infill was just minutes away. Great, he thought.

“Some fall victim to bankruptcy after losing their jobs or businesses, others fall foul of the draconian Eurostate correctional system. But many end up there through mental health problems, emotional or psychological traumas. They slip through the safety net…or are even dumped there by members of their own families!” It took a moment to realise the bearded charity worker with an intense holier-than-thou stare was talking about non citizens. Steven’s interest pricked up. “I’ve even come across cases where unwanted children, often born with deformities or physical disabilities or learning difficulties, are dumped there by their parents. And what about the innocent children who are born out there?” The camera switched to the anchorman.

              “We’ve been hearing these arguments since the so-called Exiles Act was passed by the Eurostate six years ago and the latest official figures show that ninety-eight per cent of those stripped of their citizenship are hardened criminals who repeatedly flout the laws of our society. Only two per cent are economic exiles, bankrupts or the terminally unemployed who refuse to take up re-training schemes, military service or places on Eurostate employment programmes.”

             
“You’re talking about official government figures again. They don’t paint the full picture! We do not accept that there should be any criminal or economic exiles, legitimate or otherwise, never mind thousands who live in our industrial wastelands simply because the system…our society…has failed them. It’s…”

             
“Surely the point, Mr Benson, surely the point this morning is how many of your colleagues at Justice for Exiles and volunteer workers with other such groups must die before the Eurostate Parliament has to pass legislation banning you from accessing these wastelands?”

             
“That is not the point! The point is…”

             
“The point is your north-eastern co-ordinator…”

             
“Let me finish, please!”

             
“…Germaine Phelan is, this morning, dead…”

             
“Please!”

             
“…brutally murdered by waste-dwellers…”

             
“I must point out…”

             
“…and that she is the eighteenth victim in British Eurostate this year!”

             
Steven smiled and flicked channels. Menna was right. Talking heads. He heard the kettle boil and padded back to the kitchen portion of his living area. As he poured the water into his mug his mind returned to last night’s mystery. Where to begin? He had the medal, and surely Jerry’s military contacts would be able to explain its significance. He had the photographs, but how could he establish the identities of the bodies he had seen…and then find out why the police had released the names of three waste-dwellers? He flicked back to INB. The anchorman was winding up, settling back into the plush red armchair as he introduced the regional news teams.

             
“This is Steven Elan reporting…”

             
It would be so much easier to ring up the police press office, explain he had taken snaps at the scene and that the three corpses were not the people described in the official statement…and what the hell was going on? “But then,” Jerry had explained, “they would know that you were onto them. You’d put them on their guard and they’d have time to really cover up what they’re trying to hide, good and proper. All you’d have then is a police statement apologising for the previous erroneous statement and no story!” Assuming, of course, it was a cover-up and not simply a genuine mistake. Habeas corpus, body of evidence.

             
The mortuary. Of course! Why hadn’t he considered it before? Whatever the official line on the Jaguar’s occupants, their bodies would have been taken to the mortuary. The easiest way to prove the information in the police statement was wrong would be to compare the three bodies in the mortuary with the descriptions given for the three waste-dwellers. The city mortuary, that would be his first port of call. Did it open on Saturdays? Did it open to members of the public? Where was the city mortuary?

             
That might prove the police statement was a fiction, but how could he find out who the three victims were? Who did he know who moved in the elitist circles of Eurostate officialdom, never mind who would also have fingers in military pies? Nobody, that was the short answer. Nobody he knew moved in those kinds of circles…except…”

              “Giles?” The face on the vidi-phone screen certainly looked like the Giles Spearbrand he remembered, though the years had certainly not been kind to his former journalism training course cohort. “Giles, is that you?”

             
“Who the fuck is that?” croaked a voice that betrayed an owner who smoked and drank too much and slept too little. “And how’d you get my number?” There was a pained moan somewhere in the background. Steven heard the rustle of bedsheets…bedsheets of a luxurious kind.

             
“Giles, it’s Steve…Steven Elan. Remember me? Merthyr Express, now with the South Wales Echo.” Giles was staring blearily up at the two-way screen, as if trying to focus.

             
“Steve…course I fucking remember you! But what God forsaken time of day do you call this? Have you no manners?” The body behind him moaned again. Steven was unsure if it sounded male or female. Giles had always been prolific when it came to the pleasures of the flesh and he never seemed fussy about which direction those pleasures came from.

             
“It’s nearly ten.”

             
“But it’s Saturday for fuck’s sake! Saturday!” Giles screwed his face.

             
“Sorry, Giles, but I need a favour.”

             
“Fuck off! Call me some other time.”

             
“It’s important. I need your help. You’re the only one I could think of.”

             
“Whatever it is can wait.”

             
“You’re still with the party press office, aren’t you?”

             
“Don’t sound so surprised. Just because you haven’t heard from me since the last election.”

             
“You know how you like to flit around.” The smug public schoolboy look flashed across Giles’ puffy features as he glanced behind at his unseen bed companion.

             
“I see you’ve moved on from the Merthyr Depress then.”

             
“Onward and upward. Look, there’s a free lunch in this for you and, of course, my undivided attention at the next election.”

             
“When?”

             
“I dunno, two years. It’s your lot that call the shots on…”

             
“No, you twat! Lunch!”

             
“Today.”

             
“Can’t. Daddy’s having some old Eaton chums around for dinner. Thinks it might do me some good to show my face.”

“They’re mostly the other side, aren’t they? I thought your lot frowned on establishment public schools.”

              “Well, you never know. They might get in next time round.”

             
“You tart! Can I quote you?”

             
“No, you fucking well can’t. Listen, can’t we do lunch next week sometime?”

             
“No Giles. I’ve got this major league story. We’re hoping to break it on Monday. I figured you could help me fill in some of the gaps. I’d owe you, big style.”

             
“Major league, eh? Well you’ve got my attention. Tell me more.”

             
“The police are trying to cover up some kind of…scandal.” Giles loved that word, and would automatically assume it was of the political variety. “I can’t say much more over the phone. Please, Giles.”

             
“Scandal, eh?” Giles put on his best effort at indecision but Steven already knew that, despite the play acting, his mind was already made. “Well…I guess I could squeeze in an early lunch. Say…the Brasserie, at one. That suit?”

             
“Great! Thanks Giles. My tab.”

             
“But of course! A light lunch, mind. I’m watching my figure!”

             
“See you at one.”

* * *

              The city mortuary turned out to be at the University Hospital of Wales and, although it was by prior appointment only, Steven’s Echo credentials had smoothed the way for access at 11am. Deprived of the pool car, he made his way by bus, remembering to hang on to his receipt as he swiped his card through the autofare. A major league story deserved a major league expenses claim…and Giles would see to that with his ‘light’ lunch.

As the bus approached the hospital, Steven wondered how long he would be able to maintain the element of surprise. The police, assuming they were involved in the cover-up, would not expect anyone to come snooping around the mortuary. As far as anyone, other than himself and Jerry, was aware yesterday’s crash was nothing more than a routine RTA with four fatalities, only one of which was of any concern. Nothing for the press to get excited about. It was unlikely the bodies would be guarded. Steven winced. It was more likely that three of the four bodies would not be here at all. He would find out soon enough.

             
“Hello Mr Elan.” The quiet monotone voice reminded him of his school librarian, whose hushed tones were never more than a whisper, even when admonishing rowdy pupils. “You said you were doing some research.” The attendant, a short, slightly built man in his twilight years, shook his hand limply. “It is normal procedure to make prior arrangements through the hospital trust press office, given the sensitivity of this facility and the nature of your…profession.” The attendant rubbed at a patch of sweat on his balding forehead and wiped his hand casually on his white protective overcoat. It occurred to Steven that hygiene might not be such an issue in this section of the hospital.

             
“Yes…sorry for the short notice. It’s just that I’m wrapping up a feature on people with unusual jobs…this weekend…and it struck me your job…well.” The attendant smiled warmly. Steven knew at once he had chosen the perfect ploy.

             
“I see. Well, lucky for you, the mortuary supervisor is not on duty today. She likes to play golf on Saturdays. Or else she would have insisted you clear things with the press office, and they’re not back until Monday.”

             
“That would be no good. You see, the feature has to be…” The attendant reached out a soothing hand to his sleeve. Steven wondered where else, other than his sweaty head, it might have been today.