The Peco Incident (16 page)

Saxton took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. ‘Son, we have feathers from his house that prove a native parakeet had been there recently. Two days later, health officials saw a native parakeet in
this
house. It’s circumstantial I know, but I’m sure that tests will show it is the same bird.’

‘She’s not sick,’ said Nick. ‘She hasn’t got bird flu.’

‘Perhaps not, but she may be a carrier. The virus can be in some birds and not cause them to be sick. But that doesn’t stop the virus being spread to others.’

I broke in. ‘What are you going to do with her?’

‘We will take her away and swab her. If she is—’

‘Why can’t you do it here?’ interrupted Nick.

‘Because,’ said Saxton as if talking to a child, ‘it takes days
to get the results. If she
is
infected, we don’t want her giving it to other birds. The Peco epidemic is over. The last thing we need is another outbreak.’

‘We’ll make sure she doesn’t go near other birds,’ I said.

Saxton looked from one of us to the other.

‘Please!’ pleaded Nick. ‘We promise.’

The man gave a sneering laugh.
‘You! Making promises!
And why should I expect any promises from you two to be kept? You’ve lied right from the very start, and I doubt that you’re going to change now. Even assuming that you might, it is illegal for you to keep that bird without a permit. No — I have no choice. We take her away.’

‘What if she is a carrier?’ I asked. ‘What happens then?’

‘She gets treated the same as all the other birds that we found at Mr Murphy’s place. She gets euthanized.’

‘You mean killed!’ said Nick.

‘That’s what would have happened straight away if she’d remained in Mr Murphy’s house. This way she gets a chance. We will test her first.’

‘And if she’s not a carrier?’ I asked.

‘She will live.’

‘Will we get her back?’

He shook his head. ‘That won’t be up to me. But I think it unlikely. You’d have to get a permit from the Department of Conservation before she could ever come back here.’

There was nothing to say after that. A while later Saxton and the leading security guard were kitted out in biosecurity suits ready to attack Harriet.

‘Is that necessary?’ asked Mum, showing alarm.

‘Probably not,’ said Saxton. ‘But they’re required by our rules, and I never bend the rules.’

Shortly afterwards they entered the house carrying a metal box.

Harriet did not go quietly. After screeching noisily for a while, her objections became more specific. ‘Help! Help! Murder! Murder!’

Then, as they carried her out of the house in the box, she started swearing, giving them the full range of words she’d picked up over the years.

They bundled her into the BIRT vehicle and took off. There were no goodbyes from them, and they never gave us the chance to say goodbye to Harriet. All we could do was watch in sadness as the vehicle disappeared along the road to Dunedin.

T
hat night, Nick and I lay in our beds talking until way after midnight. On other nights if we’d talked late, Harriet would have soon snorted her disapproval. But of course there was no Harriet, and we now found that we missed her grumpiness. The bedroom just didn’t seem the same without her.

Most of our talk was grumbling about Saxton, who was top of our list of most-hated persons. Brio easily took the second position. She would be promoted to number one if we could prove for sure that she’d brought the disease into the country. In our minds we felt that if we could prove that, we might have a chance of saving Harriet, or at least giving some meaning to her death.

Although we talked well into the night, we came up with
nothing. Even after Nick fell asleep I lay awake trying to make sense of it all, with no more success than before. The only conclusion I came to was that Brio was evil; trying to understand what happened inside her head would be near-impossible, and could even be dangerous.

The next day was a rest day in our adventure tourism mission. I spent the morning finishing off the Harriet carving for Murph. If I didn’t give it to him soon, it could be too late. Carving Harriet’s image was also good therapy, and did a lot to help me cope with her loss.

Mum was at the Albatross Centre and Dad was at the TAB in the pub, leaving Nick and me to make our own lunch.

‘I’ve got an idea,’ said Nick as he munched a tomato and cheese sandwich.

‘Wow — that’s wonderful,’ I said. ‘Did you think it up all by yourself?’

Ignoring my sarcasm, he continued. ‘You remember those piles of rubbish bags at Allans Beach?’

I nodded.

‘Well I think some of that rubbish would have been left by Brio and Roost.’

‘So?’

‘Before they went to Oz, they probably cleaned out all of the stuff they didn’t need any more. There might be evidence in that rubbish.’

‘And your idea is that we should search through them?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Yuk!’

‘Yeah, I know,’ said Nick, smiling. ‘But maybe we’ll find eggshells or something like that.’

‘They were already stinking two days ago,’ I complained. ‘They’ll be even worse now.’

‘We can wear gas masks,’ argued Nick. ‘Your dad’s got some in the shed.’

He did, too. They were old World War Two models that he’d just finished restoring back to working order. Not that he intended them to be used. His idea was to sell them as war relics.

I thought about Nick’s idea. It was a good one. It might provide the proof we were after. The gas masks were a good idea too: if Brio and Roost had left rubbish which included infected eggs, then some breathing protection might be desirable. The only hitch I could see in his plan was that by now the council would probably have cleaned up the illegal rubbish dump.

The car park was packed with vehicles from the city. Over the holiday period, day-trippers flocked to the beaches on the peninsula for a day in the sun. It was great for the people, but not so good for the wildlife which found they no longer had the beach mostly to themselves.

There were more rubbish bags than before. The ten or so bags of Boxing Day had grown into thirty or more. It was going to be a big job, and not one that I wanted to do in public, which was a problem, as there always seemed to be somebody in the car park.

In the end, we found a secluded spot where we could sort through the rubbish without being disturbed. When the car park was free, we would grab a couple of bags each and haul them away. After they were searched, we would swap them for another batch.

It was quite an experience. The sort of stuff we put in the rubbish at home was mostly packaging material that couldn’t be recycled. I soon found out that other people’s rubbish was quite different. The most disgusting stuff was raw meat or fish. Possibly it was already off when it was thrown out, but now it was giving off an absolutely disgusting smell which wasn’t entirely blocked by the gas masks. Disposable nappies were another revolting thing we could have done without — them and bags of dog poo.

A lot of this stuff was full of maggots. Very large blowfly maggots that when released seemed to find their way into our gloves, our clothes and even our hair. It was just as well our faces were covered by gas masks, or I’m sure they’d have climbed up our noses or into our mouths.

Despite these distractions, we slowly worked our way through the bags. We found lots of eggshells, and in every case we searched that bag more thoroughly. Unfortunately we didn’t find anything that could be linked to Brio or Roost.

We’d just emptied another batch of four bags onto the ground when a male voice boomed out. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

I looked up to see a man holding a rifle. He was quite young, and was dressed more like a farm worker than a holiday-maker.

Nick mumbled something behind the gas mask.

‘What?’ demanded the man.

Nick lowered the mask. ‘I said, we’re doing a rubbish survey for a school assignment.’

The man relaxed a little. ‘During the school holidays?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ replied Nick. ‘I’ve got to have it finished before we go back.’

‘Is this the local school?’

Nick shook his head. ‘No, it’s my school back in Hastings.’

‘Then why don’t you do it back in Hastings instead of here? This is private property and look at the mess you’re making.’

‘We’ll clean it all up,’ I said. ‘We didn’t know it was your property.’

He smiled at that. ‘It’s not
my
property. I’m just killing some of the rabbits. But I did ask permission first, and that’s what you should do. Otherwise you’ll get into trouble. I could have shot at a rabbit and got one of you instead.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Yes, well you’d better clean up that mess and leave, or I’ll get blamed for it.’

We said we would, and he walked away, just as silently as he’d approached.

When he was out of hearing range, Nick asked, ‘What are we going to do?’

‘Finish the job,’ I said. ‘There are only a few bags left. It won’t take long. Anyway, he won’t come back here. He’ll look for rabbits somewhere else.’

So we continued.

We struck gold on the second-to-last batch of bags. I suppose if we’d thought about it, we should have started with the oldest bags: the ones that were dumped when Brio and Roost were still around.

At first it wasn’t obvious that we’d found anything special. There were eggshells and they were white, but we’d found the same thing in lots of other bags. The difference with this bag was that there were also a whole lot of chewing-gum wrappers.

Nick fished one out and held it up. ‘Brio’s?’ he asked.

‘Could be,’ I replied, trying to contain my excitement.

He peered at the paper. ‘Made in the United Kingdom,’ he read. ‘Where’s that?’

‘That’s where Scotland is,’ I said.

He gave a big grin. ‘Then let’s go to work.’

We emptied the whole of the bag on the ground so that nothing would be missed. As it turned out, the evidence we were after would have been pretty hard to miss: a large part of the rubbish was several squashed little boxes.

When I unfolded one I discovered it had once contained a toy dinosaur egg. The instructions on the back showed that if you put the egg into water a dinosaur would hatch within two days. It seemed like an interesting idea. I looked around
for a complete egg, but there were none — nine empty boxes without a single egg.

However, there were the clear blister packs that had protected the dinosaur eggs, and it was one of these that told me we’d found what we were looking for. An egg had smashed, leaving bits of shell and yolk stuck to the inside of the pack. I felt certain that the toy dinosaur eggs had never contained any yolk — that had to come from a real egg. If that’s what this packet had contained, then probably all the others had as well.

Then we found absolute proof that this was Brio and Roost’s rubbish. I fished out a larger carton that had once contained twelve of the dinosaur boxes. With it were the remains of a postal package that had been sent from Scotland to a Ms Talia Cottingham, care of Penelope’s Backpackers in Dunedin. Talia Cottingham: Brio’s real name.

When I showed the package to Nick, we danced around with excitement. We finally had concrete evidence. Now people would believe us.

After a while we calmed down and studied the packing in detail. A green customs slip was stuck to the outside. Alongside the contents bit was written
Children’s toys.
Probably it was Brio’s handwriting — she’d sent the eggs to herself. It was then that I began to get angry. She’d sent her poison to New Zealand labelled as children’s toys.

Toys!

Her ‘toys’ had killed tens of thousands of birds, and were now threatening some very special penguins. It upset me that
anybody would even think of doing such a thing, let alone act upon it.

We returned to the searching with greater determination than ever. A few minutes later we had more proof: a newsletter from a group called SCARO — the Scottish Animal Rights Organization. Although stained with food scraps, it was mostly readable. I half expected it to contain something written by Brio, but there was nothing, not even her name. Still it was good evidence, coming in the same rubbish bag as a package addressed with her name.