Requiem (32 page)

‘Not that I know of.’

There were questions she should ask, but her brain was thick with tiredness and it took a moment for her to grasp them.

‘What follow-up studies have been done on fenitrothion?’ she asked finally.

‘Ah!’ The bugman went to a shelf, selected two identical pamphlets and handed her one. The pamphlet was titled
Population, Biology and Control of the Pine Beauty Moth
. On the cover was a glossy photograph of the caterpillar, no longer the faded drab specimen of the show case but a smartly attired fellow in green, brown and white stripes, captured in the act of eating his way down a branch of pine needles.

The bugman leafed through his copy. ‘There’s a summary of all the major impact studies … On birds mainly …’

‘What about the impact on people?’ she asked.

‘The operators, you mean? They have to take precautions, of course. Mixing the chemical, filling tanks and so on. They wear full gear – you know, space suits, masks.’ The bugman found his place in the pamphlet and read: ‘The effect on humans is … insignificant. Well, that sounds fairly definite, doesn’t it?’

‘What about people caught in the spray drift, people on the ground?’

‘Um …’ He referred again. ‘Not discussed here. Probably not enough people to study. They’re always careful to clear the area, you know, before they start spraying.’ He replaced the pamphlet on the shelf. ‘No, if you wanted to know more on that, you’d have to ask a toxicologist. Though I have to say I’ve never heard of anyone having any long-term health problems from fenitrothion.’

‘A plane that was spraying the beauty moth – would it have to be specially equipped?’

‘If it was using ultra-low-volume technique, yes.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Ah.’ He gleamed with quiet pride. ‘It’s what we’ve been pioneering. Much smaller chemical droplets, more efficiently distributed. Less chemical used, more effective, less damage to wildlife.’

‘So the plane, what would it need for that?’

‘Special atomisers. They fit them onto special arms under the wings.’

‘And this ultra-low technique, is it in wide use? Would there be many aircraft fitted up for it?’

‘Not yet,’ he said with the disappointment of an ideas man finding himself pitted against the inertia of the real world.

‘Otherwise … if a plane was using the old technique?’

‘Then the regular spray booms, I suppose. But they give you nasty big droplets, and you miss the larvae who aren’t right at the top of the canopy. A high miss rate.’

A high miss rate. Perhaps in Loch Fyne they had suffered a high miss rate during an early spraying, and had needed to dose the forest again in a hurry.

The Metro’s heater choked a stream of luke-warm air, and Daisy had turned onto the Farnham bypass before her feet began to defrost. Even then she couldn’t shake off a permanent sense of cold which seemed to have rooted itself low in her stomach. The drive back up the A3, far from being an opportunity to think, became a long exercise in staving off drowsiness and failing concentration. Maybe it was just lack of sleep; she had stayed up until one, sifting through the latest batch of case histories from EarthForce in Washington, going through the information from military air traffic control on the flights sanctioned in the Loch Fyne area. Then, when she’d finally got to bed, it had been to lie half-way between wakefulness and nightmare, her brain dogged by images of a featureless woman lying face down in water. Later, when she finally slept, it was to dream that Adrian, like Alusha Mackenzie, was dead.

She found a parking meter at the back of King’s Cross, an unheard of stroke of fortune, and, dodging the ladies of the night who seemed to be out in force, she hurried through the litter-strewn streets to the office.

Jenny was perched at her desk, clad from spiky head to booted toe in black, long fringes of jet beads trailing from her jacket sleeves, like the wings of a recently alighted raven. Crouched over the telephone, she waved a batch of papers at Daisy and raised her eyebrows to indicate their importance.

A mug of coffee sat steaming at Jenny’s elbow and, taking the papers in one hand, Daisy deftly removed the coffee with the other and headed for her office. Alan’s door was partially open and she could hear his cool reasonable murmurings as he talked to someone on the phone. She padded quickly past and slipped into her office, closing her door silently behind her. Alan had been trying to catch her for a couple of days now but, having a fair idea of what he wanted to talk about, she was not too keen to be caught.

She sat down and, swigging at the coffee, glanced over the papers. They were copies of the legal correspondence on the Adrian Bell case which Mrs Bell had arranged for her solicitor to send over, though not without difficulty. Mrs Bell’s solicitor had not taken kindly to the idea of Catch’s involvement, and had responded to Daisy’s phone calls with what could only be described as resistance.

Nonetheless, the correspondence was here, and there was quite a lot of it, including, she noted straight away, a letter from Willis Bain’s lawyers.

The first part of the letter contained few surprises. Willis Bain absolutely denied any liability concerning the alleged accident. They also denied having treated the woodland next to the Bell home at any time during the previous June, or indeed in the weeks immediately adjacent to the alleged date in June. The block of forest in question had been sprayed only once during the year in question, in mid May, they said, when every possible safety procedure had been carried out: notifications posted to all neighbouring properties, including the Bells’, and the police and local authority informed in accordance with legal requirements. Furthermore, the spraying method had conformed to Ministry of Agriculture and Civil Aviation Authority guidelines. The pesticide used was fully approved for aerial use.

Fully approved. Which meant that, unless Willis Bain were lying through their teeth, they had used fenitrothion.

Daisy went through the bundle once more before turning to her messages. Peasedale, she saw, had called again. Like Alan, he had been trying to get hold of her for the last two days. The reminders to call him, penned in block letters on yellow stickers, sat in silent rebuke on the body of the phone.

‘Fenitrothion,’ she said immediately Peasedale answered. ‘Could it possibly have been involved in the Bell and Mackenzie cases?’

‘Listen, it’s appalling – Nick Mackenzie’s wife.’ Peasedale’s usual tone of scientific detachment had escaped him and he spoke almost plaintively, interspersing his words with sudden sighs. ‘Appalling. Was anything being done for the poor woman? I mean was there any follow-up? Was she under a competent toxicologist? I can’t get it out of my mind. I keep thinking about her. Do they know exactly how she died? Was it the effects of some treatment she was getting? I have this awful feeling that maybe I missed something, that maybe I didn’t look into it closely enough.’

Daisy told him what he wanted to hear. ‘It wasn’t you. There wasn’t anything you could have done.’

‘Do they know exactly how she died?’ Peasedale repeated.

‘I’m not sure,’ she lied, remembering only too vividly the minute details that Simon had relayed to her from the
Sunday Times
news desk, and, by remembering, experienced some of the initial horror all over again.

‘You haven’t been in touch?’ Peasedale asked.

‘Hardly.’

Picking up the warning note in her voice, he retreated. ‘No, I suppose it wouldn’t be the right moment.’

‘No. Now how about fenitrothion?’

‘Fenitrothion?’ he repeated blankly.

‘Could it have done this sort of damage?’

There was a silence. She could almost see him sitting there in his lab, perched on his stool like a stork on a chimney pot. ‘My first instinct is no. But let me have a think about it, will you? A day or two? I’d really like to stick with this one. I mean – I’d like to feel that I’d done my utmost. You know.’

Daisy knew. It was all about making oneself feel better about something one felt bad about.

‘And Adrian Bell,’ she said. ‘It could well be the same stuff. When can you and Roper get up there?’

‘If you can fly us, I think we could make it this weekend.’

Return flights plus car hire plus meals. She wondered what part of the expense budget could be expanded to absorb it.

Ringing off, she managed to keep out of Alan’s way for another five minutes, but it couldn’t last. She heard him come off the phone, leave his office to chat to Jenny and then, with the inevitability of a parent coming in search of an unruly child, he was at her door and sidling in.

He sat at the side of her desk and gave her a sympathetic but cautious smile. ‘How are you doing?’

‘Fine,’ she said looking back at her work.

‘Listen, the Mackenzie case – you have to look on it as just one of those things.’

Alan took pride in being able to rationalize everything, to take the cool dispassionate stance, to learn and grow, as he liked to put it.

When she didn’t respond, he tried: ‘These things happen.’

But Daisy wasn’t in the mood for banalities. ‘They do, do they?’

‘You mustn’t take it personally.’

She sat back in her chair. ‘Sure.’ She heard the sarcasm in her voice but was unable to suppress it. ‘I could always pretend I’d done a good job.’

‘That’s not fair. You couldn’t have done any more than you did, not when the Mackenzies had shut you out.’

‘But I should have
realized
.’

‘Realized what?’

‘That it couldn’t possibly have been Reldane.’

‘But how could you?’

‘Jeese, it was blindingly obvious, Alan. Or should have been, if I’d had a fraction of my brain in gear.’

‘Okay, let’s say you should have guessed,’ said Alan, at his most conciliatory. ‘But would the Mackenzies have listened? Even if you’d had some evidence to back you up? I doubt it. I get the impression Nick Mackenzie had made up his mind about what happened and wasn’t about to change it, not for anybody. And even if you
had
persuaded him to listen, d’you think it would have made any difference? I mean, to what happened. I really don’t think so.’

She was ready to accept that he might be right, but at the same time she wasn’t ready to let the matter go that easily. She was still feeling too angry with herself. She needed time to come to terms with what had happened in her own time, at her own pace.

‘It might have made a difference,’ she said unrelentingly.

‘Come on, Daisy.
If
someone had found out what it was that affected her,
assuming
it was a chemical – ’

‘What do you mean,
assuming
?’

‘Okay, okay.’ He held up a hand to signal his unconditional withdrawal. ‘Okay, so it was a chemical, and if we’d known which one,
maybe
it would have changed things … But we never knew, did we? And we never will, either.’

Daisy picked up some papers and shuffled them noisily. ‘Maybe we won’t,’ she said evasively. ‘But then, maybe we will.’ She could feel Alan staring at her, trying to work out what that statement might mean in terms of her own involvement.

‘Well … It would be good to know, of course,’ he said dubiously. ‘But the cause and effect would be hard to prove. After the event, I mean.’

Perhaps it was the sleepless nights, but she was too tired to argue any more. She dropped the papers back onto the desk with a plop. ‘Just so long as Adrian Bell doesn’t go the same way.’

Alan looked suitably horrified at the thought. ‘Of course not. We must do all we can.’

‘Then you’ll agree to Catch stumping up the cost for Peasedale and Roper to go and see him?’

Resentment sprang into Alan’s eyes, as if he suspected her of having led the entire conversation up to this neat little trap. ‘Can’t Adrian come down to London?’ he suggested weakly. She shook her head.

Alan was not graceful in defeat – he pulled a succession of unhappy faces – but he did at least recognize defeat when he saw it. ‘Okay,’ he grumbled. ‘I’ll swing it somehow. But just this once, Daisy.’

‘Thanks, Alan.’

He grunted and made a hasty retreat. Daisy sat for a moment, staring at the wall, letting the last of her emotions subside. Then, turning with relief towards more positive thoughts, she lifted the phone and called Simon. He wasn’t at home, but the
Sunday Times
seemed to think he was somewhere on the editorial floor. While she held, she allowed an indulgent vision to slide into her mind, a picture of herself in Simon’s flat having a hot bath and a glass of wine while Simon got dinner and listened to her troubles.

He was sounding rushed when he finally answered. ‘Preelection hysteria,’ he explained. ‘The latest poll just put Labour five points ahead.’

She made her little plea – or maybe it was a cry for help.

‘Dinner?’ he echoed, and there was a sudden distance in his voice. She could almost see him calculating the time and effort it would take to shop and prepare the food and cook it. ‘I won’t finish till late, but I suppose I could pick something up from the Indian,’ he suggested eventually, making no attempt to conceal the reluctance in his voice.

The thought of a featureless curry of unknown origin did not enthrall Daisy, but tonight she’d have been happy with a can of beans so long as it was cooked by someone else. ‘That sounds fine.’

‘The fridge is rather bare,’ he mentioned. ‘I can pick up some milk, but we’ll still need bread. And I think I’m out of fruit …’ He left the observation hanging in the air, awaiting suggestions. But her suggestions box, like the fridge, was bare, and when she failed to answer he rang off, sounding aggrieved.

Daisy reflected that Simon had many qualifications for the New Man – he related well to women, he made lists, pushed shopping trolleys, cooked adventurous Sunday lunches, consulted her religiously over film and theatre bookings – but this was one occasion when Daisy wished she could trade some of this refurbished masculinity for a burst of wild old-fashioned initiative, even – dare she say it – protectiveness.

It was late, but, unable to summon the energy to leave, she flicked half-heartedly through her mail. Alice Knowles had sent the latest news of her case, adding a note to say that despite the recent setbacks – she had been refused legal aid – she was still determined to go ahead with the legal action, come what may. Doubtless Alan would think Daisy had secretly been encouraging her, which she had not, but then there was nothing Daisy could say on the subject of the Knowles case that didn’t bring scepticism into Alan’s eyes.