Fourth Horseman (3 page)

I
WATCHED OUT OF
the window of the squad car as we drove along the quiet lanes. We were only about four miles from the house where I had lived all my life, but until a year or so ago I hadn’t known the area existed. There were very few buildings, just the occasional farmhouse and yard. There were meadows and cornfields, but most of the land was covered by orchards. Their days were numbered, Dad had told us, because they didn’t produce the kinds of apples that the EU wanted. Some of them were being grubbed up already.

‘What’s all this with the squirrels, anyway?’ said PC Courtney.

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t remember the exact words of the caution I’d been given, but I was pretty sure I didn’t have to say anything.

‘What was it?’ she went on. ‘A zoo or something?’

When I still said nothing she talked to the other constable, the man who had cautioned me and who was now driving the car. ‘Do you know anything about the place, Chris?’

He shook his head. ‘I never even knew it existed. No idea what they were doing there.’

‘Squirrels,’ said PC Courtney. ‘Was there any other kind of animal there?’

‘No,’ I said, then wished I hadn’t. If I was going to say nothing I should say nothing.

‘Just squirrels?’ she said. ‘So why did they have the little ear tags?’

I didn’t answer.

‘Was there some kind of experimentation going on?’

‘Must have been something like that,’ said the policeman called Chris. ‘Funny we never heard anything about it.’

‘Is that what this is all about?’ said PC Courtney. ‘Are you an animal rights activist or something?’

I kept quiet, and she sighed and gave up questioning me. By now we were approaching the familiar outskirts of Worcester and the car had slowed behind a line of traffic. I realized I knew very little about the law. What did they do with young offenders? I was pretty sure I was too young to go to prison, but I thought they had places where they locked up juveniles. Could I handle that? Would I have to be in there for years?

I wondered if someone would get less time behind bars for being an animal rights activist or more time. I knew the authorities had been getting much tougher on them in recent years. I would have to think about that.

A
NIMAL RIGHTS ACTIVISTS CAME
into our conversation that day after the rained-off match, when Dad broke the news to us about the offer he’d had from Mr Davenport.

We were sitting round the kitchen table drinking tea and eating cucumber sandwiches, which was traditional during our cricket matches. The rain was still falling outside, but Mum was optimistic that it would stop and that we could resume later on.

‘It’s another government project,’ said Dad. ‘I was on their records for the flatworm work and so they didn’t have to look very far to find me. It’s essentially the same kind of project, but this time there’s no doubt about the need for it. It’s a scheme to save the red squirrel.’

He didn’t need to spell out the background to us. We all knew that red squirrels were on the point of being wiped out entirely by the more successful grey ones.

He went on: ‘This Davenport bloke says they have no facilities yet but they’ll find something nearby if I agree to take it on. They’ll start paying me straight away and I can get the theoretical work up and running. Then I can start on the practical side of things when they find a suitable lab.’

‘Are there any round here?’ I asked.

‘They can adapt practically any kind of building apparently,’ said Dad. ‘Money seems to be no object.’

‘So what exactly would you have to do?’

‘Well, pretty much what I was doing with the flat-worms. Study the genetic codes and create a virus that will …’ He hesitated.

‘Kill the grey ones,’ said Alex.

‘Well, yes,’ said Dad.

And not the red ones,’ said Alex.

‘That’s about the size of it, yes.’

We all thought about that for a while, and it was clear that Dad was the only one of us who had any enthusiasm for the idea.

‘It seems cruel, I know,’ he said eventually. ‘But sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.’

‘No you don’t,’ said Alex. ‘All you have to do to be kind is be kind.’

‘You know what I mean,’ said Dad. ‘I don’t really like the idea of killing the grey squirrels, but they’re killing off the red ones wholesale. If something isn’t done about it they’ll soon be extinct.’

‘In Britain,’ said Mum.

‘Yes, in Britain. I don’t know about other places.’

We still didn’t like it. Mum in particular looked very dubious.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Dad said to her. ‘Myxomatosis.’

She nodded. ‘I was, actually, yes.’

We were all familiar with myxomatosis. It was a rabbit disease that had been introduced from South America into Australia a few decades ago to control the expanding rabbit population. Accidentally, they say, it got into the UK as well, and began spreading across the country. Its effects were dreadful. It caused a slow and painful death, and most people who lived in the countryside were familiar with the sight of ‘myxie’ rabbits, their heads swollen, their closed eyelids bulging. Ironically, Dad had told us about it as an example of how not to use virology in the environment but now, it seemed, he was willing to do something similar himself.

‘This will be different,’ he said. ‘For one thing I’ll make sure the virus works rapidly. No long, lingering deaths.’

‘Can you do that?’ I asked.

‘I think so,’ said Dad.

‘And for another thing?’ said Mum, still sounding sceptical.

‘For another thing, we won’t be introducing it wholesale across the countryside. We’ll just give it to the red squirrels and let them pass it on.’

‘Oh, great,’ said Alex. ‘Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose?’

‘No,’ said Dad. ‘Because the red squirrels won’t die from it.’ I watched his eyes grow bright as he talked. Dad was not beyond being enthusiastic about other things in life—cricket, for example—but nothing excited him as much as his own field of endeavour. We could all see that he had already become emotionally charged by the possibilities of the new project. ‘It’ll be like a common cold to them. In fact that’s what I’ll base the new virus on: some common or garden disease that all squirrels get. But I’ll change it, just a bit, so that it’s lethal to the greys.’

‘How?’ said Alex.

‘Depends. What I’ll need is a small but significant difference in some important cell. I’ll have to study the genome analysis of both species and see if I can find something to work on. Mr Davenport says he already has them. There are a couple of companies in America that specialize in producing genome plans from anything you give them. That’s why it’s all ready to go. I can be working on them while he finds the lab facilities.’

‘But why would you want the reds to get it as well?’ I asked.

‘That’s the beauty of it,’ said Dad. ‘We give it to the red squirrels and they carry it, passing it around among each other the way we pass around a cold. But whenever a grey one comes along he catches it and snuffs it. Hopefully he passes it around to a few mates first, and they snuff it as well. So the red squirrels become more successful, because they can breed and take back the territory they’ve lost to the grey ones. And the grey ones will just fall back as they advance.

‘You see?’ He turned to Mum in something close to desperation. He badly needed her blessing. ‘It’s not like myxomatosis at al. There’s no need to infect the whole grey squirrel population. We’ll just give the reds a bit of an advantage, that’s all. A kind of secret weapon.’

‘Was that bit your idea or Mr Davenport’s?’ I asked.

‘Mine,’ said Dad. ‘But he’s delighted with it. Says it’s perfect.’

But Mum was still uneasy. ‘What bothers me is why all the secrecy? I would have thought that it would be a popular initiative. Wouldn’t the government make some political capital out of it if they made it public?’

‘They will, later,’ said Dad. ‘But not until the work is finished, because of the animal rights activists. They’re everywhere, in every nook and cranny. I’m going to have to experiment on real squirrels, and you know what some of these people will think of that.’

Mum nodded guardedly.

‘They’re practically terrorists, some of them,’ Dad went on. ‘They don’t just picket laboratories and write letters to the newspapers any more. They threaten the researchers and their families. Life wouldn’t be worth living if any of those fanatics got a whiff of the project. We’d have to barricade ourselves in and take the kids to school in an armoured car.’

‘All the more reason not to get involved in the first place, I would have thought,’ said Mum.

Dad walked out. He didn’t say anything, he just walked out, reaching for his cigarettes as he went. Mum looked miserable. We all knew what was happening.

‘He really needs this, Mum,’ I said.

‘I know he does,’ she said.

‘And anyway,’ I said, ‘it all seems a bit unlikely to me. I have a funny feeling nothing will ever come of it even if Dad does agree to do it.’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ she said.

‘I am. And you have to support him. He supported you, remember?’

Mum nodded and I knew she had come round. I’d won the day for Dad and I was delighted with myself.

But I wasn’t half as clever as I thought I was. Not by a very long chalk.

I
HAD PASSED THE
front of the police station in Worcester a thousand times but I had never before seen the back of it, and I had never been inside any part of it. I was driven into a kind of yard and from there taken in through a heavy door. It was very quiet inside the building and I was astonished when I caught sight of a clock on the wall and realized what time it was. Still only ten thirty in the morning. The extraordinary, cataclysmic events that had led up to our arrest had all happened in not much more than an hour. I found it almost impossible to believe. It felt more like a week.

There was no sign of the others. They must have left a while after we did, but I presumed they would appear before too long. I was keen to see both of them, for different reasons. I was worried about Alex.

‘Can I see my brother?’ I asked PC Courtney.

‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry, though. We’ll look after him.’

We were standing in a wide corridor beside a closed door. A few metres away the policeman called Chris was talking quietly to another officer who I suspected, from his demeanour rather than his dress, was senior. I couldn’t make out much of what they said but I heard the occasional word here and there. ‘Eleven what? …Squirrels? …How old are they?’

PC Courtney must have heard that as well, because she asked me, ‘How old are you?’

‘Fifteen,’ I said, and then, as if it made any difference, ‘Nearly sixteen.’

‘That man is the custody officer,’ she told me. ‘His name is Sergeant Woolley. He’ll take some details in a minute.’

The other two wound up their conversation and the sergeant opened the door and led us into the room.

‘She’s fifteen,’ PC Courtney told him. ‘Laura McAllister with an address in Broadheath.’

‘Laurie,’ I said. ‘Not Laura.’

The sergeant spent a few minutes logging on to a computer, presumably opening a new file. He asked me to spell my name, and typed it in.

‘Date of birth?’

I told him and he typed that in as well. Then he turned to PC Courtney, who launched into a long-winded description.

‘There has been a fire at a building in Hetherington Lane causing a high degree of damage, and this person was found close by. We can’t tell yet whether or not the fire was started deliberately but this person was found to be in possession of certain items, including an entry card, believed to be for access to the building, and a cigarette lighter, which led me to believe that the fire was started deliberately, and that this person is one of those responsible for causing the fire. She was arrested at the scene and brought straight here.’ She handed over the bag with the contents of my pockets in it and the sergeant wrote something on it in black marker, and then typed something else into the computer. Then he asked me whether I was hurt, or whether I had any illnesses or disabilities, or whether I was on any kind of medication. I answered no to everything.

‘You’ll need to call an appropriate adult to be with you when we question you,’ said Sergeant Woolley. ‘I understand your father has been taken to the hospital.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Have you heard anything?’

‘Not yet. We’ll make enquiries and let you know as soon as we can. What about your mother? Should we call her?’

I shook my head. There was no one on earth I would rather have seen at that moment than my mother. But she, as luck would have it, was about as far away as it was possible for her to be, happily ignorant of the storm that surrounded the rest of us. She was at a conference way down under, in the home of the notorious flatworm.

D
AD TOOK THE JOB
, inevitably, but it took some time for all the details to be worked out and it wasn’t until August that he went to London to meet Mr Davenport and sign a contract. He told us that he had to sign the Official Secrets Act as well. When Mum heard that she went ballistic.

‘The Official Secrets Act? I thought only soldiers and spies had to sign that. Since when have squirrels been enemies of the state?’

‘It’s the animal rights activists again,’ said Dad. ‘There have been some terrible cases recently. People intimidated, places closed down. They don’t want loose talk wasting them a humungous amount of money, that’s all.’

‘Well, we all know. Did anyone think of that? What happens if Laurie or Alex tell their mates?’

‘They won’t,’ said Dad, looking daggers at us.

We wouldn’t, of course, but it did all seem a bit sloppy if it was so important.

‘Well,’ said Mum, ‘I just hope you know what you’re doing.’

‘I know exactly what I’m doing,’ said Dad.

Within a few days of Dad signing the contract, a courier arrived at our house with a fantastic brand-new state-of-the-art computer. He and Dad manhandled the huge box into the study and Alex and I brought in the printer and the scanner and other smaller things. One of them was a package containing DVDs, which had the squirrel genome information from the company in the USA.