Fatlands (22 page)

‘Hi, Frank. Thought you'd like to know. It's Wednesday evening and I've been invited to a dark place to meet some animal rights activists.' And I gave him the address.

I
parked my car as near as I could get. In daylight it would have been no problem. In daylight you could almost have seen the Holloway Road from the playground, and if you were in trouble, your voice would be heard in the council flats a hundred yards behind. At night they'd still hear you but choose to believe they hadn't. The place was darker than I had anticipated, mostly because the two street lamps provided by the council had been hit by delinquents. Mind you, how dark does it really get in London? Not like a country lane. Not like that at all.

The gate was locked. I jumped over the fence. On the right my torch lit up a sandpit with a metal climbing frame arching over it and a small, wide slide. On the left was a long rocking horse, the sort that hasn't changed design since the 50s. I looked at my watch. 1.25 a.m.

You think I'm stupid, right? Out at night without even a kung fu lesson between me and my last débâcle. Well, if it's any consolation I did have something nasty in my pocket. But I was banking on not having to use it: since from where I was standing now one animal rights activist was no longer the same as another. Though such was the growing nature of my obsession that deep down
I was almost sorry it wasn't going to be him. Dark places, dark thoughts. If you don't let them in, they just scare you more by rattling the window panes. Behind me a swing creaked.

‘Hello.'

I turned swiftly. Maringo was sitting on a roundabout holding on to the bar like an overgrown child. I really hadn't seen him. But then he must have had a lot of practice walking softly in the night. ‘Hi. How's the baby?'

‘Cutting a tooth.' First sign of a carnivore. But no doubt he'd thought through all that. ‘What happened to your face?'

I had hoped the night might help. But even shadows can be uneven. ‘I ran into a fist. It was moving at the time. Where are they?'

‘Here.' It was a voice in the darkness behind me. Not a good idea in my present state. I started to turn round.

‘No,' it shouted.

‘He doesn't want you to look at him,'said Maringo quickly. ‘In case you recognize him later.'

‘Tough,' I said angrily. ‘The last time I turned my back on someone I ended up in hospital. If he's got something to say, he can say it to my face or not at all.' And I started to walk away.

‘All right,' the voice behind me called. ‘But remember, you've never seen me, right?'

I turned and walked towards him. From the darkness emerged a small man with a shock of black hair and a bomber jacket. He was right. I had never seen him. Thank God. ‘I'm listening.'

I think my face made quite an impression. Certainly when he spoke, his voice was more sulky than belligerent. ‘I'm here because Ben Maringo vouched for you. Understood?'

‘Understood.'

‘You don't need to know who I am or where I come from. All you need to know is what I tell you. The ALF had nothing to do with the deaths of Tom or Mattie Shepherd.'

‘I know that,' I said, and my little theory gave a cry of joy at being so alive. ‘But you did send him threats.'

He let out an angry breath. ‘Some, but not all. And only because of what someone sent to us.'

Confessions. The perfect growth hormone for my theory. I couldn't wait. ‘So tell me.'

He shot a quick glance at Maringo. My sponsor gave the slightest nod of the head. The bomber jacket took a breath. ‘OK. At the end of last November one of our cells started receiving anonymous information through the post. It was about work being done at Vandamed's research centre in London. The cancer unit. It suggested that certain experiments were contravening regulations, and that the head of the unit had authorized them. If it was true, it would have been dynamite. Trouble was we couldn't get into Vandamed to prove it.'

‘Tough security, eh?'

‘The best. Has been for years.'

Interesting. ‘Why didn't you leak it to the press? If it was that juicy?'

‘Precisely because we couldn't verify it. The information was hearsay, nothing official. Given our reputation, we can't afford to get it wrong, and we've been taken for a ride before.'

‘So you tried a little intimidation instead?'

‘Sometimes it works.' He didn't sound too repentant. ‘Some of these bastards do have a conscience underneath it all.'

‘But not Tom Shepherd.'

‘Put it this way. According to our “informant” he didn't exactly have a shining record.'

‘You mean AAR? What's illegal about that?'

‘We're talking morals here, not law. Unfortunately they're not the same thing in Britain, in case you hadn't noticed.'

Let's hear it for self-righteousness. Good guys, bad guys; I tell you if it wasn't for the deaths I wonder how much there would be to choose between them. ‘So tell me about the morals.'

‘AAR. Aaargh.' And he rolled it off his tongue like a country yokel. ‘It'll probably go down in the science history books as a miracle drug. Except like all “product enhancers” , as they like to call them these days, nobody's too keen to talk about what it does to the product. Don't expect you've given a lot of thought to the quality of life of pigs?'

Here we go again. ‘You'd be surprised. You're telling me AAR is worse than breeding sows with more teats so they can get shagged out faster producing more and more piglets for the Safeway meat counters? Seems to me whatever happens it's always the women who suffer.'

Behind me I could almost hear Ben Maringo smile. His ‘friend' had less of a sense of humour. ‘Right. But we're talking a different kind of oppression here. AAR is a drug.'

‘So's aspirin,' I said, just because a girl's got to have some fun in her life. ‘From what I hear, at least it's better than BST or the stuff the Italians fed to their calves.'

The man snorted. ‘So it's a synthetic compound, not a hormone. You try and explain the difference to the pigs. It still goes into their systems. Still makes them bigger faster than they can cope. The only thing that keeps most of them alive until the slaughterhouse is the antibiotics.'

It sounded a little melodramatic, even for a convert. But what did I know? ‘What's wrong with them?'

‘Infections, weakness, you name it. And stress. Pigs are
notoriously nervous animals. Cram 'em together in a dark shed, and apart from starting to eat their own crap, which causes further disease, they can also get violent. So they dope them, too. But since Vandamed not only makes the booster drug but also the antibiotics and tranqs that counteract its effects, they're not complaining. A nice hermetic system, eh? You get the meat, they get the money. And God help the animals.'

‘God or you?'

‘I told you, we didn't plant any bombs. Even with his record, there are names higher up the list.'

I thought of asking who they were. But it wasn't the moment to push my luck. ‘So if it wasn't you, who was it?'

‘Someone who wanted us to get the blame. Someone who knew our methods. Knew the kind of people we targeted, and the sort of threats we make. Four of the warnings that Shepherd got were from us. I could tell you exactly what they said. But according to the police there were six altogether, and I can guarantee you that only the last two were specific death threats. Those came from someone else. The same people who strapped the fire bomb under the petrol tank. Also something we'd never have done.'

‘If you're innocent, why didn't you go to the police? Tell them what you've just told me?'

‘Didn't you just hear what I said? These guys knew what they were doing. We didn't go to the police because they wouldn't have believed us. And because the people who didn't kill Mattie Shepherd have done other things. And to deny one, we might find ourselves having to admit to others. The best we could do for ourselves is to keep quiet. Whoever framed us knew that, too.'

He was right, of course. Given the boys' position on animal rights, the departure from style of the death threats and the way the car bomb was placed were niceties they
might find it all too easy to overlook. It wouldn't have been the first time. As stitch-ups go the needlework was very fine. But then it would have to be.

‘So what would it take for someone to know enough to duplicate your methods that precisely?'

‘It's not an insider, if that's what you mean. That boy in the police photographs. He's not one of ours.'

I snorted. ‘I wouldn't go on the photograph. His own mother wouldn't recognize him.'

‘No. But we would. I've told you. He's been checked.

He didn't come from us.'

Very IRA. ‘So where did he come from?'

‘Over the years we've made a lot of enemies,' he said, more with resignation than with bitterness. ‘Take your pick.' I already had. Maybe he had too. We kept our thoughts to ourselves. ‘OK,' he said abruptly. ‘I've said what I came to say. We don't owe you anything now, Maringo, right? I'll see you around.'

And we both watched him disappear into the darkness. There was a long pause with just the low rumble of late-night traffic on the Holloway Road in the distance. I suppose I was waiting for the sound of a car engine to start up, to prove he had really gone. But then maybe some people are green all over. I wondered if they used unleaded petrol in their fire bombs. Terrorists on bicycles. It just seemed wrong somehow. But then how about killers on motorbikes?

I turned to Maringo. ‘Thanks.'

He nodded. ‘Sounded like you were there already.'

‘Not really.'

‘But you've stopped eating pork?'

I thought about it. He was right, I had. ‘Yeah. But I don't know if it's for the right reasons.'

Now it was over I felt altogether a little less sure of myself. As I walked to the roundabout my knees had a
definite wobble. I sat down. I pushed my foot along the ground and we started to move, making a slow stately circle in the dark. The world in the round. Quite a different perspective.

‘Does that mean you don't know who did it?'

‘The who I think I've got. Problem is, it doesn't make a lot of sense without the why.'

‘Maybe I can help. I've been doing a little research of my own into Tom Shepherd's career. And his miracle drug.' He smiled. ‘Well, academic training dies hard. I thought you might like to know that when it was tested in its original form for the treatment of asthma, there was a tiny but significant side-effect. In the clinical trials the drug was found to have some effect on the heart.'

‘What do you mean “some effect”?'

‘I mean a certain tiny percentage of people—particularly those with any history of angina—complained of pains, palpitations, that kind of thing.'

Palpitations, eh? Just at that moment I was having a few myself. ‘And what would that mean when it was translated into AAR?'

‘Something or nothing. Hard to tell. Depends on too many things. The dosage, how it was administered, the possible combination with other medications, antibiotics and the like. There're so many permutations. That's why these drugs take so long to test properly. But I suppose it's possible that under certain conditions the pigs would have suffered heart problems too. There's a particular breed of pigs—Peitrains they're called—who are susceptible to heart trouble anyway. They might have seen an increase there. Or it might have been more widespread. I have heard for instance that just over a year ago Vandamed made some adjustments to the consistency of the drug feed. It was pretty late in the day for such changes.
I mean they'd taken their time developing it and if they wanted to make a killing they'd have to move fast to get maximum profits before their patent ran out. Anyway, what they did was to reduce the dust intake in the feed. So less of the drug could get in through the respiratory system. It may or may not have been connected. Either way, of course, as long as it was just the pigs, who gives a damn? … I mean we're talking dumb animals here, remember?'

Ben Maringo, may your child grow tall and strong like a tree, bringing honour to his father's house and vegetarianism unto the world. I had a few more questions. One was about farm drug trials, and what happened to the pigs after the trials were over. I already knew most of the answers.

I got back at 2.45 a.m. I was too excited to go to bed. But that was OK. I had waited a long time to feel this way and there was a lot to do before morning. Plots can be complicated things when you come at them backwards. I sat at the kitchen table and worked till dawn, then lay down and closed my eyes. I didn't think I'd sleep. But I was mistaken.

The phone woke me at 9.50. It was the Finchley florists. She gave me the name of a shop in Golders Green. They had phoned through the order yesterday morning. It had been quite a rush job, apparently. But that was all she could tell me. Golders Green, eh? Not exactly the most exotic place to wind a story back to. But everyone has to retire somewhere. I made other phone calls to a couple of Suffolk vets and that registrar in Framlingham I hadn't been able to contact earlier. Even more pleased with myself, I then set off, stopping at an instant printer's on the way. How instant, of course, depends on cost and
quality. I had towait. But if a job's worth doing it's worth doing well, that's what Frank always says, and he's a man who knows more than most about fake IDs.

Golders Green was easy. Getting James H's address proved a little trickier. Under usual circumstances I could have depended on my charm to get me through. But now that work depended on it I had had to go back to the mirror. I used the one in the bathroom. It had been the easier to turn around again. What I had seen was not encouraging. There had been some progress in the lip and the left cheek, but the eye was still sliced up and vicious. In my imagination I had been healing faster. But when it came to facing the rest of the world, looking like something the Kray brothers had just finished with was probably not the best way to encourage strangers to open up to me.