Ken McClure - Deception

‘That’s when Childs and Leadbetter came on the scene and the organic farm business was born.’

Trish nodded.

‘So what are they actually doing here?’ asked Steven.

‘I don’t know,’ replied Trish. ‘I just know that they’ve been taking measurements around the place and digging up samples of the soil in various places around the farm but I think that’s just them keeping up the pretence of the organic business.’

Steven looked at her, trying to decide whether she knew any more or not. He decided that she’d told him all she could.

‘What happens now?’ asked Trish quietly.

‘I’m not sure,’ said Steven. ‘Childs and Leadbetter have been up to something tonight and I think tomorrow’s Clarion will tell us what it was. Maybe then I’ll see what the end-game is. Don’t tell them about our conversation, will you?’

Trish shook her head. As they rose to rejoin the others, she asked, ‘Can you prove that they murdered Tom?’

‘No,’ replied Steven. ‘But I know they did.’

Eve put her arm round Trish when they entered the living room and ushered her to a chair, saying that she would make some tea. She threw an accusing look at Steven who shrugged his shoulders in reply. ‘We’ll be going now,’ he said.

‘See yourselves out, won’t you,’ said Eve coldly.

‘Well, what happened?’ asked Brown as soon as the door had closed behind them.

‘The barn does contain BSE infected material but it’s not feedstuffs: it’s rendered cow carcasses. Trish insists that it was all quite legal but that needs checking out. I need you to find out everything you can about BSE cull material and what the government says happened to it.’

‘Cull material?’ said Brown. ‘I thought they burned the carcasses.’

‘That’s what I thought too,’ said Steven.

‘I’ll get on to that first thing in the morning,’ said Brown.

‘No!’ said Steven. ‘Tonight. Stay up all night if you have to.’

Brown looked at Steven to see that he was serious and saw that he was. Well, I suppose I’d just be lying awake wondering what McColl’s going to come up with,’ he said.

Steven drove Brown up to The Scotsman Offices in North Bridge, Edinburgh and dropped him there.

‘I’ll call you as soon as I have it,’ said Brown.

Brown phoned at five am. ‘Did I wake you? Good. I’d hate to think I was the only one having fun.’

‘What did you get?’ asked Steven.

‘We were wrong about the carcasses being burned,’ said Brown. ‘That was the plan but apparently there was some kind of fuck-up over incineration capacity and the stuff has been building up ever since all over the UK. Basically, the carcasses were either put into cold storage or sent to rendering plants where they were turned into a granular material and now it’s being stockpiled in a variety of storage facilities up and down the country.’

‘Any idea how much?’

‘There is currently a little over seventy-two thousand tons of the stuff being stored at two official sites in Scotland. They’ve only managed to dispose of eighteen thousand tons in the last three years and their best estimate says they’ll only manage to get rid of sixty percent of it by the end of 2002. At the moment it’s costing the tax payer over 1.3 million pounds a year to store it.’

‘So why don’t they burn more?’ asked Steven.

‘One, there aren’t enough incinerators, two they are privately owned so the owners can charge what they like and three, the owners don’t like burning that kind of stuff anyway. It makes a mess of their furnaces or something.’

‘You’ve done well,’ said Steven.

‘It was dead easy,’ said Brown. ‘An SNP member of the |Scottish parliament started giving the Minister for Rural Affairs a hard time over this in early summer. It’s all in the records.’

‘Why did he do that?’

‘The member claimed that there was a secret plan to start dumping a whole load of the stuff in a landfill site in the middle of his constituency and in contravention of a European agreement to burn the stuff. His constituents were up in arms and so was he. He managed to get an assurance from the minister that this would not happen and also made him cough up the figures on amounts and storage costs. I guess with the landfill plan in ruins, the pressure is on to find cheap alternative storage.’

‘But surely there must be security regulations about these storage facilities?’ said Steven.

‘Oh there are,’ agreed Brown. ‘But under the current regulations, storage facility owners are given a year’s grace. They don’t have to be licensed until that year has passed.’

‘So Rafferty was operating the store legally,’ said Steven.

‘What’s legal and what’s sensible are often two very different things,’ said Brown.

‘And never more so than in this case,’ said Steven. ‘They’re going to finish up with enough egg on their face to promote National Omelette Week.’

‘You’d better try and get some sleep.’ suggested Steven.

‘No way,’ replied Brown. ‘The special edition of the Clarion will be out soon. I want to get to it before my editor does. That way, I just might have enough time to come up with an excuse before I end up covering society weddings for Scottish Field.’

‘Call me when you hear,’ said Steven. It seemed as if he had barely closed his eyes when Brown rang back, although it was now a quarter past seven. ‘It’s out,’ yelled Brown down the phone. ‘They’ve gone with the banner, LIARS! GOVERNMENT COVER-UP! Listen to this. “The Clarion’s ace reporter, Alex McColl, has uncovered a government plot to deceive the public by concealing the fact that rats in the Blackbridge area have undergone a behavioural change due to the presence of a genetically modified crop growing on Peat Ridge Farm. We can exclusively reveal that the death of local minister, Rev Thomas McNish was not due to drowning as stated in a post-mortem report released to the press but to a rat attack, which the authorities covered-up in order to prevent public panic. It is to be hoped that the Clarion’s timely campaign to curb the rat menace will prevent the nightmare problem of super-rats spreading to other areas of Scotland.” Then they announce a new campaign and begin with “An open message to the Scottish Executive.” It says, “STOP THE DITHERING AND STOP THE GM MENACE NOW!” Tell me this is a pile of crap?’

‘It’s a pile of crap’ said Steven quietly. ‘Childs and Leadbetter set him up.’

‘But why? To create a diversion?’ suggested Brown.

‘No,’ said Steven thoughtfully. ‘It’s not a diversion they want to create... it’s a full scale riot.’

‘But why?’

‘I think that’s been their objective all along,’ said Steven, now seeing what was behind it. ‘They’ve been poisoning public opinion in the village against the GM trial from the beginning, carefully nursing fear and suspicion at every turn so that the locals would eventually be persuaded to take matters into their own hands. This story is them lighting the fuse.’

‘So what’s going to happen now?’

‘It’s my guess that, when the local hot-heads read this, they are going to march on Peat Ridge and burn the whole lot to the ground and God help anyone who gets in their way.’

‘But how will that benefit, Childs and Leadbetter?’ asked Brown.

Everything was becoming clear in Steven’s head. He’d heard on various occasions that the two men spent their time taking measurements and sampling the soil on Crawhill. They hadn’t been doing that at all! They were explosive experts. He would now bet money that they had been planting incendiary devices at specific sites on the farm so that the fire on Peat Ridge would appear to spread to Crawhill. People would assume that the fire, aided by the prevailing west wind, would have spread naturally and the barn full of BSE material would go up in flames, leaving no evidence and therefore no embarrassing problem for the government. ‘The fire is going to spread to Crawhill,’ he replied.