Birdkill Read online

  ‘Because we’re a community. An elite. The future.’

  ‘That’s scary, Martin.’

  ‘You scare easy, bitch.’

  She fought to stop herself flinching at the word. She summoned every inch of kindness in her, shook her head at him slowly. She thought of her mother, soft summer days and washing on the line, babies’ laughter and the love in her mum’s eyes even in those last final moments before they closed and she left Robyn forever. ‘I’m not a bitch Martin. I’m your mother.’

  His features had relaxed with astonishment but her words seemed to hit him physically. He shook his head, tears welled in his eyes and she radiated feelings of gentleness, pity and love at him.

  He turned to leave. Robyn called out. ‘Martin. You don’t have to fight against people. You don’t have to use hurt to make your own pain go away.’

  The small figure with its shock of mousy hair kept going. He didn’t look back.

  Back at her apartment, Robyn called up Martin’s file on the school network. She sat eating an apple and reading his reports. There wasn’t much background to be had. There was a sub-folder but when Robyn tried to access it, a dialogue flashed up demanding a password. It sent a thrill through her, somehow made the intrusion more real. She fought the urge to shut down and flee. She keyed 12345 for the hell of it. And she was in.

  She laughed, more in shock than anything. Really? Just like that? She reached for her bag, grabbed the little 16G memory key she kept in the zipped inner pocket and started copying files. She didn’t know how long this would last and didn’t want to leave traces on her notebook. She was no hacker, but she was aware of the trails that using networks left.

  She started to open up the files in the folder and read them. The assessments and child psychologist evaluations alone told of a worrying and traumatic history.

  Martin had been born to a single mother, Pamela Oakley. The father was unknown. Pam had been working on the streets in Northampton, but Martin was born in a hospital in London. She had two cautions for indecency and had been arrested for a lewd act. The referring doctor for the admission was Lawrence Hamilton.

  Robyn bit into her apple, munching and thinking about how a hooker from Northampton could afford a private hospital. And what Lawrence Hamilton could possibly have had to do with her.

  She downloaded the file and signed out of the session. She disconnected the Wi-Fi and relogged using her mobile’s data connection. She sent the folder on the memory key to Mariam, deleted her browser’s cache and history and then sat back, thrilled at what she’d just done.

  Brian Kelly’s excitement was infectious and Mariam struggled to keep up with his determined scuttle as they raced through the streets of Twickenham. He’d told her nothing, just urged her up out of her seat in the office and pushed her down the stairs ahead of him and out into the street. She’d just got Robyn’s email but hadn’t had time to read it properly, resolving to go back to it later once Kelly was off her back.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Bistro. Thought we could splurge and maybe order some lunch.’

  ‘Seriously.’

  ‘I got a contact from the Ministry of Defence agreed to talk to me about Odin. Thought you might like to come along.’

  ‘Fair enough. What if I have a heart attack before we get there?’

  ‘You’re young. You should be fitter.’

  They crossed the road onto the big, open green. Cricketers in whites dotted the tree-lined area. Mariam never ceased to be amazed by the English. ‘Jesus, they’re mad. It’s too cold to be standing around like that.’

  ‘They’ve got jumpers on. April – start of the season.

  There was a little building with a conservatory at the edge of the pitch, tables set out to the front of it. ‘Here we go,’ Kelly beamed. ‘Used to be a public toilet.’

  ‘I just went off the cake.’

  ‘Rubbish. Food here’s glorious.’ He held the door open for her and accosted the girl in uniform. ‘Table booked for Kelly.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Over here, sir.’

  They followed her to a table set against the glass. ‘Would you like some water?’

  ‘Please.’

  Kelly handed her a menu. ‘Here. I know what I’m having.’

  ‘Where’s our contact?’

  ‘Should be here any minute. Better be or I’m ordering without him.’

  The waitress brought a stoppered bottle of water. Kelly peered up at her. ‘Could I get a latte, please, Lottie? And my friend here will take a—?’

  Mariam tried not to pull a face at Kelly. She was disappointed he turned out to be a name badge reader. ‘Americano, please. No milk.’

  ‘Sure. Will you be ordering food?’

  ‘Waiting for a friend.’

  The waitress, whom Mariam had mentally christened Lottie the Latte Lady, had barely turned away when Mariam spotted a portly, nervous looking man bobbing between the tables towards them. He was balding and soft-looking, perhaps in his late thirties. His head was too small for his body. He had a fleshy nose and wide-set blue eyes.

  Kelly stood, his hand out. ‘Alan good to see you. Alan Potts, Robyn Shaw. Robyn, this is Alan, he works for the MoD in procurement.’

  ‘Shh. For God’s sake, Brian. I’m not even supposed to be within a hundred miles of you.’

  Kelly gestured Potts to a chair. ‘Right. Let’s order. I recommend the chorizo bap or the veal’s excellent if you’re hungry.’

  Their coffees came. ‘You fancy a coffee, Alan?’

  Potts started. ‘Um, yes. Please. The same, please. American.’

  Mariam was fascinated by the man, clearly nervous and not wanting to be there at all. She wondered what satanic hold Kelly had over him. The waitress was hovering. Kelly turned to her. ‘Lottie, I’ll take the chorizo bap, please. Mariam?’

  ‘The halloumi, please.’

  ‘Alan?’

  ‘The burger please. With cheese.’

  She departed and Kelly crossed his hands on the table, a benign smile on his bearded face. ‘So, Alan. Project Odin.’

  Potts glanced around. ‘Can we just call it ‘The Project’?

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Okay. It’s a disaster. There are all sorts of do not go here markers around it, it’s been classified as top secret. The PTSD suicide rate among volunteers has been meteoric.’

  Mariam was lost. ‘PTSD?’

  ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.’ Kelly explained.

  Potts’ hands were mobile on his lap, soft, pudgy pale fingers intertwined, reminding Mariam of maggots. ‘The miracle is the programme is not only being continued but has just been granted a major increase in funding.’

  ‘Whoa,’ Kelly was alert. ‘Continued? Wasn’t it shut down months, even years ago?’

  ‘Oh, no. It’s been expanded. The Americans have been contributing to its funding.’

  Mariam tried to get her head around the implications. ‘And Lawrence Hamilton has been removed from the project, then?’

  ‘No, not at all. It’s my understanding he’s very much involved. The Hamilton Institute is where it’s all happening.’

  ‘But that’s a kids’ boarding school.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ Potts licked his lips as the food arrived. He waited for the waitress to retreat. He dug his knife and fork into the burger. ‘Unless they’re teaching them how to rape and murder young these days. Because that’s all Odin’s any use for in my view.’

  School finished for the day, Robyn pulled on her wellies and her padded jacket and went for a walk on the downs. She took the footpath towards the headland with its white tower, gorse tumbled away from her to the cliffs’ edge, the grass shorn short by the sheep whose droppings scattered the barren ground. The grey rocky outcrops were spotted with yellow and white blooms of lichen.

  She revelled in the cool breeze, her spirits lifted by the clouds’ passing on the shimmering sea, dark patches on the dancing waves. Hands in pockets, she walked towards t
he white tower, an enigma in itself. For some reason it drew her, this monolith overlooking the wild grey sea. It wasn’t a lighthouse, didn’t seem as if it ever had been. Just a tower.

  As she approached it, she wondered who had built it and why they would they even bother? Its walls were painted brickwork, edges rounded by successive coats. The single door was to the landward side and had a black-painted lintel, ivy clung to the wall here, a broad base of plant cover thinning toward the roof. A hag’s pointing finger. It was bare, no name or date etched into the stone. She walked around the round structure. There was a stone bench set into the seaward side and she sat on it, looking out over the waves to the darkening horizon.

  It was an unexpected sun trap, sheltered from the wind and surprisingly warm. She closed her eyes and breathed in the briny air, a hint of the smell of land carried in the soft flow.

  Robyn woke in her apartment with absolutely no idea of how she’d got there. She remembered the tower, the stone seat and the sea. Closing her eyes. Dreaming of seagulls wheeling above white chalk cliffs.

  Her mind was playing tricks on her. Fear pinioned her, muscles straining against herself. Flee? Where? This must be what strychnine poisoning feels like, to have your body tear itself apart in oppositional strains of bone-cracking muscular spasms. What had she done?

  It was a blank. Not like the Void, not black and fearful like that, just a simple blank.

  She must have walked back from the tower. Sleepwalked? She’d never sleepwalked in her life.

  Robyn felt her mind losing its tethers, being pulled into a world where it could roam free, by itself to choose its direction, to explore the reaches of space and reality like a bird, like a gull playing in the thermals at the top of a cliff.

  Diving, into the sea. Green-tinged sunlight in the water, her yielding body buoyed up by the currents, the dancing bubbles and peace.

  Clive Warren was in the kitchen when Mariam arrived at his house just after six o’clock. There was a glass and whisky bottle on the sideboard. ‘Get yourself a drink. I’m just knocking up dinner. Hope you’re hungry after the big lunch.’

  ‘What’s cooking?’

  ‘Beef pie.’

  ‘That sounds good to me.’ Mariam did a double take, whisky bottle in hand. ‘How did you know I had a big lunch?’

  ‘I had you followed. A two-man security detail. You wouldn’t make a very good spy.’

  She let that sink in. ‘Thank you. I think.’

  ‘You’re going to need the protection. It’s the least I can do. This thing is heating up nicely. What did you make of Alan Potts?’

  She hoisted herself up onto a stool by the grey marble breakfast bar and sipped her whisky. ‘Nervous as hell. I don’t know what Kelly has on him, but it must be pretty potent.’

  ‘It is. He caught Potts with his hand in the till and has been using him as an informant ever since. Kelly’s good value. Most other journalists would have run the story, but not Brian. He’s got ten times the value from poor old Potts.’

  ‘You and Kelly have form? He didn’t seem too pleased to see you.’

  Warren nodded. ‘Pretty much anyone in the defence or security business would know him. He’s a real veteran, that one. He wouldn’t approve of any of us.’

  ‘I like him. He strikes me like a sort of malevolent gnome. Mind you, he’s a sexist bastard.’

  ‘That’ll be for your benefit. That’s part of what he does, he needles people. Rattled people give more away than serene and happy people. He’s been doing it so long it’s become like second nature.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

  ‘You got anything on in the morning?’

  ‘Nothing specific. Why?’

  Warren delved into the drawer and pulled out a corkscrew. He stripped the lead from a bottle of red wine and pulled the cork. He twisted the label to face her. Ksara. Mariam stared at the cream label with its pencil drawing of the Chateau nestled in its vineyards, the letters picked out in gold. Her gaze flew to meet his brown eyes. He was smiling. ‘I make it my business to know stuff. It’s how you stay alive when you deal with bad people.’

  ‘So I’m bad people.’

  ‘Not at all. As for tomorrow, I’ve got someone for you to meet. He was in Odin.’

  ‘A researcher?’

  ‘No. A soldier. One of the volunteers.’

  Mariam considered that one. ‘Wow. Okay. Thanks.’ She raised her whisky glass to him. ‘Cheers.’

  They went in Warren’s car, leaving early to negotiate the M25 clockwise. There was a touch of mist in the air, especially in the country stretches. It was dry, another cloudless day, but cold. The traffic snarled up by Heathrow and again before the M1 turnoff. Mariam sat back in the leather seat and listened to the debate on Radio Four, which is apparently what Warren liked to listen to when he was driving. As they turned off onto the M1 she leaned forward and turned the radio off, earning her a raised eyebrow.

  Mariam ignored him. ‘So who is this guy we’re going to see?’

  ‘Popsy Meacher is his name. He’s a bit renegade. I turned him down for security work, but we sort of kept in touch. He’s an outlaw biker type.’

  ‘What’s “an outlaw biker type” when it’s at home?’

  He laughed at her. ‘You’ll see.’

  Mariam sat back and thumbed through her email to get to Robyn’s mail from the day before. There were too many attachments for her to make sense of it on the handset and she reached out her notebook and downloaded it to that. She sat reading the file as Warren sped up the M1. He glanced across at her engrossed in reading on her screen. ‘You’ll get carsick.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘What’s so fascinating?’

  ‘It’s Hamilton. He arranged private maternity facilities for the single mother of one of the kids at the Institute. Back in the nineties. A place called the Mayview Clinic? She was a streetwalker. He referred her for admission. Who paid for that little lot, then?’

  ‘It’s a legitimate way of making money. Streetwalkers can earn good money.’

  Mariam snorted. ‘A private London private clinic for a Northampton whore?’

  ‘Maybe he was a John.’

  ‘Perhaps it was his kid?’ She gazed out at the farmland flashing by and the lorries in the slow lane. ‘Jesus. Maybe he footed the bill?’

  There was a silence in the car before they both exclaimed ‘Kelly!’ and laughed at the synchronicity of it all.

  Mariam forwarded Robyn’s mail containing Martin Oakley’s file to Brian Kelly along with the suggestion that Hamilton might have paid for her admission and a request he check London’s exclusive Mayview Clinic out.

  She sat thinking for a while. Warren turned the radio back on and that was fine, because Mariam was lost in a different problem. What if Martin Oakley wasn’t the only one? What if augmentation-mad Hamilton had embarked on a whole eugenics program? Starting with children in vitro? Or before? A breeding programme? For how many generations? What if he’d had a hand in all those kids living at the Institute?

  It was all getting a little far-fetched. Pie in the sky and all that. But on a hunch she sent a mail to Robyn’s Gmail asking for a copy of her classlist. Not the kids’ files from the server, which would leave a trail. Just the names would do for now.

  The A41 bypassed the country town of Berkhamsted, an ‘historic market town’ according to the brown sign they passed before the turning to Chesham. The town was hidden by the embankment on the dual carriageway, fields and woods to their left. They passed under an arced flyover and then Warren turned off and they started to head into the countryside.

  He parked the Jaguar in a wooded layby and they got out. The rich ‘thunk’ of the doors stilled the nearby cooing of a wood pigeon. Birdsong and the soft susurration of the leafy canopy were all around them. The ground was damp from last night’s rain, but the sky was blue. Mariam followed Warren into the woodland, wondering if she had perhaps come to trust this stranger too much.

  The
tang of wood smoke reached her just before they came to a small clearing. There was a battered camper van to the far side of it, a clothes line strung out from the back and tied to a tree. A mound of white ash was still warm, a thin trail of pale smoke making Mariam think of an aerial view of a volcano for some reason. A scattering of tatty camp chairs surrounded the fire. Parked beyond the camper was an antique-looking motorcycle, British racing green with a red and gold star-shaped logo on the tank. Warren motioned her back as he approached the camper and rapped on the door.

  ‘Fuck me, if it in’t me old pal Clive.’ The voice came from behind Mariam, followed by a metallic click. A figure loped past her, lank-haired in a greasy-looking green waxed jacket, tatty jeans and battered cowboy boots. Dirty, claw-like fingers clutched the shotgun, the eyes in the hook-nosed face remarkably blue, the stubble more neglect than design.

  ‘Morning, Popsy. Feeling paranoid?’

  ‘Kept me alive, has paranoia.’ Meacher propped the gun against the camper. ‘Pull up a seat, Colonel.’ He made a show of dusting down one of the chairs and presented it for Mariam to sit with a courtly flourish. He had a cold sore on the corner of his mouth and smelled of unwashed clothes and stale booze.

  He arranged his thin frame in one of the chairs and delved into the pocket of his jacket, pulling out a Golden Virginia tin. He popped it, taking a Rizla from a torn-flapped packet and arranging a mean strand of tobacco down the paper. With a lick and flick, he rolled the cigarette and lit it with a clink of his brass Zippo, sitting back with evident relish as he puffed smoke into the air.

  ‘So what can I for you do, Colonel?’

  Warren leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. ‘Odin.’

  Meacher stilled, only his gaze still flickered between Warren and Mariam. He took another toke of his rollup. ‘What about it?’

  ‘It’s okay. She’s family.’

  ‘Don’t look like family to me.’ Meacher picked up a stick and prodded the ashes. ‘Tea.’ He got up and fetched an armful of kindling and sticks from under an orange tarpaulin by the camper. A battered, smoke-blackened kettle was filled from a white plastic water tank and brought to the fire. Meacher stabbed a piece of rebar into the soil by the fire, its end curved into a hook which he used to hang the kettle.