Deception

ELEVEN

Steven waited until after lunch before driving out to Blackbridge to talk to James Binnie. He left it until then because he wanted to be sure that the Ferguson boy’s funeral would be well and truly over and also that the mourners would have had time to disperse. Funerals with media interest always attracted political animals who would see it as a photo opportunity, a chance to display their care and concern to the voting public. He didn’t know who would be going from the ranks of the establishment but he did know that he would prefer not to be seen by them. In view of what Macmillan had said, he would be keeping as low a profile as possible from now on.

Ann Binnie smiled pleasantly when she opened the door to him and invited him in. ‘James is in his study,’ she said. ‘He’s been expecting you.’

Ann called out to her husband and showed Steven into a small, book-filled room at the back of the house where he found Binnie sitting in an arm chair, one arm dangling over the side, the other holding a glass of whisky.’

‘Join me?’ he asked. ‘I don’t normally drink at this time of day but after this morning, I need it.’

Steven accepted. ‘How did it go?’ he asked tentatively.

‘The funeral? It was a nightmare and a damned shame for the parents. They didn’t need that on top of everything else.’

‘This was not the reply Steven had expected. ‘What went wrong?’ he asked.

Binnie took another sip of his whisky and paused for a moment, shaking his head as if unable to accept what he’d seen as really having happened, then he related the events at Canal Field Cemetery to Steven, who found himself horrified.

‘Sounds like the man must have had a nervous breakdown,’ he said. ‘What a time to choose.’

‘I don’t think choice came into it,’ said Binnie, ‘although I suspect booze did. McNish has been on the road to ruin for years. Well, it’s all over now. They pulled him out of the canal an hour ago.’

‘He killed himself?’ exclaimed Steven.

‘More likely he got sozzled and fell in,’ said Binnie. ‘I hate to speak ill of the dead but frankly, the place is better off without that man. If you’d heard him at the cemetery this morning, he would have made a barrack-room bruiser sound like Cliff Richard. He really lost it in a big way.’

‘Tell me more about the rat,’ said Steven.

‘What about it?’

‘Did you think that was a normal thing for the animal to do in the circumstances?’

Binnie looked at him for a moment. ‘Ann said you wanted to talk about rats,’ he said. ‘No, I must confess that I didn’t. In fact, I’ve been concerned about a quite few things that our long-tailed friends have been doing in recent weeks. What’s your interest in them?’

‘No specific interest,’ said Steven. ‘People keep talking about the general increase in the rat population all over the country but there’s been no mention of a change in their behaviour to my knowledge. I just wondered.’ Steven told him about the rat that had run out of the rape field and over the security guard’s shoes. ‘That’s what made me think that there might also be some kind of change going on,’ he said. ‘I remember thinking at the time that it seemed a bit odd, out of character, you might say, as if the rats had suddenly become less timid around here.’

‘I think you may well have put your finger on it,’ said Binnie. ‘The Ferguson boy getting bitten, a puppy being attacked and little incidents like you witnessed up at the field and of course, what happened at the cemetery this morning. It’s been adding up. It’s not just that there are many more of the damned things; there has been a change in their behaviour as well. I’m convinced of it.’

‘Any idea why?’

Binnie shrugged. ‘I suppose it could be that the increase in numbers has made them a bit more aggressive. Maybe they are behaving like crowded city dwellers. This could be the first recorded incidence of rat-rage!’

Steven sipped his drink and considered for a moment. ‘Your wife said you were going to ask a vet pathologist at the university to take a look at one of them?’

‘She’s been at you to help get it out of the fridge, right? I might have known it,’ smiled Binnie.

‘Something like that.’

‘Well, it won’t do any harm to have one dissected and get an idea of the local population’s general health and state of nourishment’

‘What about toxicology?’ asked Steven. He said it calmly but he knew that he was upping the stakes considerably.

‘I hadn’t really thought about that,’ said Binnie, looking at him as if trying to read his mind. ‘What exactly were you thinking of?’

‘Nothing in particular,’ lied Steven for a nightmare thought had just come into his head and he was now trying to manipulate Binnie into doing something that otherwise he might have to do himself. ‘I was just thinking of it as a… precaution.’

Binnie however, was an intelligent man. His eyes widened as the same thought came to him. ‘My God,’ he said in a whisper. ‘You’re thinking about the GM crop aren’t you?’

‘Just a thought,’ said Steven.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Binnie. ‘But I suppose it’s a possibility! I bet they never had this sort of thing in mind at their endless seminars about the unknown effects of GM crops on biodiversity.’

‘Quite,’ said Steven. ‘I suspect they were thinking more about hedgerows and wild flowers and butterflies and the like. I take it they have been treating the crop up on Peat Ridge with glyphosphate herbicides?’

Binnie nodded. ‘And glufosinate.’

‘Powerful stuff,’ said Steven.

‘It is,’ agreed Binnie. ‘Farmers haven’t been able to use them freely before so no one knows much about possible side effects. I understand a couple of monitors came along from MAFF to see that they did not contaminate the perimeter ground outside acceptable margins.’

‘But the rats have been running in and out of the field itself,’ protested Steven. ‘The margins were irrelevant in their case.’

‘I can see that,’ said Binnie. ‘My God, if you’re right and the change in animal behaviour is due to the switch to powerful weedkillers, this could spell disaster for herbicide resistant GM crops! There must be millions tied up in them.’

‘I suggest we say and do nothing until you get the report back from the vet school?’ said Steven. ’If the merest suspicion of this were to get out it could wipe millions off the shares of GM companies.

‘Absolutely,’ agreed Binnie. ‘Apart from that, we’d have a bloody riot on our hands right here. The locals would take things into their own hands as they’ve been threatening to do for weeks.’

‘When will you take the rat over to the Vet school?’

‘Right now would seem like a good time,’ said Binnie, getting up from his chair.

Steven looked at the glass in his hand.

‘I’ve just had the one,’ said Binnie.

Out in the hall, Binnie put on his jacket and called out to his wife to say where he was going. Ann Binnie came downstairs and said, ‘I’m impressed, Dr Dunbar. It’s only taken you ten minutes to get him to do what I’ve been trying for days. You must let me into your secret.’

Steven walked back to his car and waved to Binnie as he passed him in his Volvo, heading off for Edinburgh. Steven drove off up the road between Crawhill and Peat Ridge, intending to do the same but slowed when he saw Eve Ferguson walking up the road ahead of him; her red hair was unmistakable. As he drew nearer he could tell from her demeanour that she was upset. Her hands were sunk deep into her coat pockets and she was hanging her head. Steven drew to a halt beside her and looked across. She walked on as if unaware that he was even there. He parked the car and got out to walk beside her. ‘Penny for them,’ he said.

She glanced sideways and said, ‘I didn’t realise it was you. I don’t really want to speak to anyone right now.’

‘Not even a stranger?’

‘Well, maybe a stranger,’ she conceded after a short pause.

They turned off the road to join the canal towpath. ‘I heard what happened,’ Steven said. ‘James Binnie told me.’

Eve shook her head. ‘It was awful,’ she said. ‘I can’t begin to tell you how bloody awful it was. Mum and Dad should have been able to look back on today as the day their son was put to rest with respect and dignity. Instead they’ll have nightmares about it for the rest of their lives. I hope McNish rots in… Oh God, no I don’t. What an awful thing to say. Oh my God…’

Eve stopped walking and broke down in tears. Steven wrapped his arm round her and drew her to him. ‘It’s all right,’ he soothed. ‘You didn’t mean it.’

‘Why am I having this conversation?’ asked Eve through her tears. ‘I don’t even believe in anything. Yes I do. Oh God, I don’t know what I believe any more.’

There were more tears until eventually Eve calmed down and got back her composure. Steven shushed her as she started to apologise. ‘No need,’ he said. ‘Remember, I’m a stranger. Just say what you feel. Let it all come out.’

They walked on for a bit and then Eve said slowly and deliberately, ‘When I heard that they’d taken McNish from the canal, I was so pleased.’ She paused, obviously having difficulty getting the words out. ‘Until today, I’ve never understood these people you see outside courts on the news,’ she continued. ‘You know, the ones leaping up and down and spraying champagne all over the place when the criminal who murdered their husband, wife, son, or whoever, goes down for life, but now I do. That’s exactly how I felt when I heard about McNish. I actually felt delighted. I didn’t know I could feel like that about anyone’s death.’

‘And now you’re hating yourself for feeling that way?’

‘In a word, yes.’

‘Don’t. Nothing you said or did or felt under the conditions you found yourself in today has any relevance to the real, rational Eve Ferguson. The phrase, “while the balance of his or her mind was temporarily disturbed” doesn’t only apply to people who’ve committed crimes, you know. It’s something that can happen to all of us under extreme pressure. The real you is the one talking now.’

Eve dried her eyes and blew her nose. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You seem to know rather a lot about these things. You’re not some kind of doctor, are you?’

‘Not a practising one.’

‘But you are a doctor?’

‘I work for the Sci-Med Inspectorate,’ said Steven. ‘I’m an investigator but I’d rather you kept that to yourself.’

‘So why tell me?’

‘Because you trusted me with your thoughts.’

‘That simple?’

‘That simple.’

‘Can I ask what you are investigating?’

‘The GM crop problem on Peat Ridge Farm.’

‘I don’t think it’s an investigator that’s needed,’ said Eve. ‘It’s a couple of sheep dogs to sort out these squabbling clowns down at the hotel. I don’t think they can agree on what day of the week it is.’

‘The politics of the situation don’t concern me directly,’ said Steven. ‘Just the science and what they’re doing with it.’

‘All right, I won’t ask any more questions,’ said Eve.

‘I’d like to ask you one,’ said Steven. ‘Do you know how I could get in touch with Trish Rafferty?’

Eve looked at him out of the corner of her eye. ‘Why?’

‘I need to talk to her.’

‘What about?’

‘Life with Thomas.’

‘She’d probably question you calling it a life.’

‘That bad?’

‘He didn’t beat her up, if that’s what you mean. He’s just a lazy drunk. Great fun for his pals in the pub but a complete pain in the arse to be married to, I should think.’

‘I gather he was pretty much always like that,’ said Steven.

‘So?’

‘So what finally pushed her into leaving him?’

‘Funny you should ask that,’ said Eve. ‘I remember wondering about that at the time because he didn’t seem to be behaving particularly badly, in fact, he’d just bought her a new car a few weeks before she left but she never told me why she walked out and to this day, the subject is still off limits.’

‘So you’ve seen her since she left him?’

‘Once or twice.’

‘So are you going to tell me where I can find her?’

Eve hesitated for quite a while before saying, ‘Trish was the nearest thing to a friend I could get around here. She’s much older than I am but she’s an intelligent woman and I enjoyed her company. We could talk about things other than what was on telly last night. I’m not at all sure about your interest in her. What aspect of her life with Tom is it that you want to know about?’

‘I understand how you feel,’ said Steven, ‘and I respect your loyalty but Thomas Rafferty told me that everything he’s doing these days he’s doing in order to get his wife to come back to him. I want to know what his chances are.’

‘Why? What on earth has the Raffertys’ private life to do with your investigation?’

‘If Trish Rafferty tells me that she’s considering coming back to Rafferty when he’s sorted himself out, well and good. I’ll wish them both well, but if she says that there’s no chance of a reconciliation, Rafferty probably knows that too and there’s some other reason behind his sudden passion for organic farming.’

‘Trish lives in Edinburgh. She has a flat in Dorset Place. It looks out on the canal, would you believe?’

‘The same canal?’

‘The very same, about fifteen miles from here.’

Steven wrote down the details and thanked Eve for her help.

‘I feel like I’ve betrayed her,’ said Eve.

‘You haven’t, believe me.’

Steven drove slowly into Edinburgh, wondering again about the GM crop and whether or not there was a connection between it and the change in the rats’ behaviour. If there was, then he had just found the missing motive for attempting to discredit Agrigene and having their crop destroyed. The worrying drawback to this conclusion was that it implied that someone already knew about the rats’ behavioural change. But who and how exactly?

Had this type of crop been tested on some other site? Was the problem confined to the Agrigene strain or was it a more general problem connected with the weed-killers rather than the crops? The questions were coming thick and fast, not least was the one concerning the warning off that Sci-Med had received at the outset. This suggested strongly that it was the government or some part of it who knew that there was a problem with the crop but clearly, they were not willing to deal with it openly.

Could it be something so sensitive? Something so liable to attract scandal and adverse publicity that they felt forced to disrupt the trial surreptitiously and come up with an excuse to destroy it? Steven could even find support for that theory in the pension deal that Gerald Millar had received. That must have had official sanction. Millar must have been encouraged to concoct a misleading report in order to discredit Agrigene and put an end to their trial but then again, Fildes, his boss had known nothing at all about it, nor had Millar’s colleagues.

This suggested to Steven that it had not been sanctioned through normal channels but that it had been part of a covert operation being run from within government circles and possibly with the blessing of someone in high office. He could even put money on knowing its code name. Sigma 5. That would explain the reaction when he had asked Sci-Med to inquire about it. The whole thing had obviously gone badly wrong on the ground when the ranks of officialdom spawned by two governments had started locking horns over responsibility for what was going on in Blackbridge.

Steven tried to step back from the details and take a look at the bigger picture. He supposed that it all made some kind of chilling sense. The days when people imagined that the British government wouldn’t do that sort of a thing were long gone. Too many embarrassing cover-ups and manipulations had come to light in recent years. The fact of the matter was that the public were dead set against the idea of GM crops and the government had flown in the face of public opinion by granting a plethora of licenses to research companies to carry out trials on them.

It was true that many of these permissions had been agreed before public awareness had been heightened by press coverage of the subject and ‘genetic’ had become a scare word — Agrigene’s license was an example of this, but once granted, the permissions lasted for several years. Agrigene’s license ran until the year, 2003. Now it was all looking like a recipe for disaster.

But if the problem were a general one, concerned with the use of powerful weed-killers, there would be no point in just destroying the Agrigene crop on its own, Steven concluded. There were similar trials going on all over the UK. Herbicide-resistant oilseed rape was one of the commonest GM crops around. This tended to imply that there might be something specifically wrong with the crop up on Peat Ridge Farm. But what? He felt uncomfortable with this thought. From what he’d seen, the crop was exactly what its designers claimed it to be.

‘Damnation,’ Steven sighed. Theories were all well and good when everything fitted but when there was something that didn’t fit — even if it seemed like a tiny detail — it was his experience that that usually turned out to be the hole below the waterline. He would proceed with caution and try to keep an open mind. This meant that he would have to consider other possibilities as to why a secret government initiative had been mounted in order to discredit and destroy a perfectly harmless crop.

Steven turned into Dorset Place and found visitors’ car parking space outside a pleasant block of modern flats, sitting on the south bank of the Union Canal. He checked the number of Trish Rafferty’s apartment on the paper in his pocket and got out to walk over to the entrance and press the entryphone button.

‘Yes?’

‘Mrs Rafferty? My name is Steven Dunbar. I’m with the Sci-Med Inspectorate. I wonder if I might speak with you?’

‘The who?’

‘The Sci-Med Inspectorate. It’s a government body. I can show you identification.’

There was a long pause before Trish Rafferty activated the door release and Steven walked into the hall and headed for the stairs. He ran up them two at a time and knocked gently on the front door that had been left ajar.

‘Come.’

Steven could see that Trish Rafferty was angry. She was standing in the middle of her living room, arms folded and face red. She was clearly having difficulty reigning in her temper. Steven, feeling distinctly uncomfortable because he had no idea why, showed her his ID.

Trish scarcely glanced at it. 'You people…’ she hissed through gritted teeth. ‘You people promised me that I would never see or hear from you again! Promised! Do you hear? What the hell do you think you are doing, coming here to my home?’

‘Steven’s first thought was to say that there had obviously been some mistake and that no one from Sci-Med had contacted her before, but he stopped himself in time. It would perhaps be more useful to let the woman speak her mind.

‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware of that…’ he said contritely.

‘You promised me!’ stormed Trish. ‘That was the deal. I would tell you everything I knew. You would put a stop to it and he would not get into any serious trouble with the law. That would be an end to it. After that I was not to see you or him ever again!’

‘I really am sorry about this, Mrs Rafferty. It clearly shouldn’t have happened but I’m new to the job and I wonder if you wouldn’t mind just filling me in on some of the details… of the agreement, that is?’

Trish looked Steven for a long moment then said suspiciously, ‘Who the hell are you?’

‘As I said, I’m from the Sci-Med Inspectorate,’ said Steven evenly. He got out his ID card again but Trish waved it away. ‘You’re not one of them at all, are you?’ she said, anger now being replaced by uncertainty in her voice. ‘Get out!’ she said. ‘Just get the fuck out!’

Steven paused outside to look over the wall of the car park and gaze down at the canal for a few moments. Well, well, well, he thought. What was that all about? It was obvious that Trish Rafferty had had some sort of recent dealings with officialdom and she’d mistaken him for one of them, whoever ‘they’ were. Curiouser and curiouser… He hadn’t imagined that Trish Rafferty had been playing any kind of active part in this affair. What was it she’d said? She’d told them everything she knew and that she didn’t want to see them or him ever again. Could the, him, referred to, be her husband? If that were the case, it seemed to answer his original question about the possibility of a reconciliation. There wasn’t going to be any. The rest had been a bit of a bonus.

Steven glanced up at Trish Rafferty’s window before he got in to his car. She was standing there looking down at him and she had a telephone to her ear. He would have given a lot to know at that moment who she was calling.