Horseflesh

Second!”

  “So?” I asked through a mouthful of Lamb Rogan. I was watching something ‘blokey’ on Dave – Wheeler-dealers or something like that. Who says men can’t multi-task?

  “So – well the next one is him. And then there’s this meteor business.”

  “Oh yes?” I confess I was in auto-response mode, I’m afraid it’s sometimes the only way to survive Mum’s calls. I was probably enthralled by a clutch-change.

  “Yes – in Russia. Fireballs from the sky…!”

  “Sorry – what?”

  6.

  You probably remember the meteor if only because of those camera-phone videos. Ace footage of a fireball streaking across the sky followed by windows being blown out by the sonic boom. I’d seen none of it, being holed up in a lab or on the Tube all week. I’d barely seen daylight let alone TV. I seldom watched live TV anyway – why bother when iPlayer gets you the bits you really want without all the crap?

  “It’s a sign!”

  “It is not a sign, mother, it’s just happenstance.” Aha! The benefits of hindsight. “And anyway it didn’t hit anyone, did it?” I explained, hurriedly looking it up on my iPad.

  “That’s not the point! It’s an omen – it’s the plagues to come that’ll cause all the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth!” It sounds dramatic – she was saying it for effect. She was no bible basher when I was little and whilst boredom may have made her mind more susceptible she didn’t believe most of it. “First the Pope, now the meteor. And the food contamination!”

  “It’s not contaminated; remember I test it for a living, it’s perfectly fine…”

  “It is contaminated – it’s contaminated with horse…”

  “But that’s not…”

  “…and heaven knows what else!” Sometimes you just don’t argue.

  “How’s Dad?”

  7.

  Sorry about the gap: it’s now Sunday morning. Only I suppose you didn’t notice, did you? Got distracted, went to check the traps then fell asleep. I seem to be doing that a lot lately. Body clock all to pot.

  Just re-read what I’ve written so far and realise how off the point I’ve wandered. I can only apologise, but it’s my diary so – well, tough. I guess I’ve been finding it therapeutic – is that how you spell it? – I could check but can’t be bothered if I’m honest. Spelling’s just one of the things that just doesn’t seem to matter any more. Funny how that happens – you only realise what’s important when it’s too late. What’s the song? ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’? Then something else about a parking lot. Never understood that bit.

  Got an e-mail from the Nigerian Prime Minister this morning! Whoopee! Made me laugh: ‘We would like to deposit fifty million dollars into your account and you will be paid two hundred thousand for your troubles’. Are people actually still out there sending this stuff? I can’t believe they are. It’s machines, must be; machines that keep on running, keeping churning it out even though the people have gone. Free spins, you’ve won this, your PPI claim has been successful and you may be entitled to a bigger penis. Funny to think when they sent that spacecraft off looking for aliens in the seventies they thought long and hard what message to put on it to explain who the human race were. There was a written message, pictures, a piece of music (could have been Tchaikovsky), not sure what else. Agonised they did. And now with half the people gone (or more!) the machines continue to churn out this crap and it’s that which will reach whatever alien life form and tell them who we are and how we lived.

  Lived.

  Still online – the internet isn’t dead. There’s life out there, but it’s difficult to tell what’s real and what’s a scam. Already had a couple of run-ins which is why I’m here, safely alone. We’ll see.

  But I’m off at a tangent again. Re-reading I realised I need to go back and tell you about my work, because that’s where it started.

  8.

  I told you I did testing. Well that’s maybe under-selling it. I did the testing, the important stuff. Not sure why I was pretending earlier. There’s loads of labs and like I say we do stuff for all kinds of organisations to fill in the gaps but the main work is government work – a blue label always takes priority. No questions, always secret. Sometimes I don’t know what it is I’m testing for, though I’m smart enough to make a good guess. There’s poisons and toxins and all sorts of grim stuff. Conscience? If I didn’t do it someone else would. A thin defence I know but let he who is without sin cast the first stone, and all that. Been reading a lot of The Bible lately.

  So Craddock brings in a load of big-wigs – up in the conference room I only ever get invited to on special occasions. There’s glasses and water but no food – a bad sign.

  “Ah, Mr Kennedy, sit down,” Mister – another bad sign. I was convinced it was the sack, but: “I’m Kevin Wilson, these are my colleagues Mr Telling and Mr Tabbard. Jeff Craddock of course you know. Now then we need your help.” My help – fabulous. Dodgy, I thought, but fabulous. “This horsemeat business – as you know it’s worse than we thought. To be honest everyone’s at it, which in some ways makes it better than a limited scale event.”

  “For us,” added Mr Tabbard - a wiry man with a moustache and no discernible personality.

  “Indeed,” confirmed Kevin Wilson. Long story short – they had a mountain of testing needed doing, in confidence. Apparently they’d confiscated all positive samples, not just from the UK. Wanted to know more about the horses: were they diseased, was there a common source, what could I tell them about the origins. And was there anything else in there.

  “So basically if there’s more bad news, you want to find it first.”

  “That’s correct, it’s our duty.”

  “So no one else does.”

  The third man, Telling, smiled a measured smile. That’s how I recall it – measured.

  “I won’t tell you otherwise, Mr Kennedy. And bearing in mind that the Official Secrets Act covers your work for us. Yes – we need to know and we need others not to.”

  “You see people ultimately don’t care about horses – they eat them on the continent, who incidentally can’t see what all the fuss is about. In fact off the record they’re finding it quite funny. Got one over on the Brits and all that. Annoys the hell out of the PM.”

  “No, horses aren’t the problem. But we know there could be more to it.”

  “Or rather, more in it. We need to know what, how much, and if possible where from. And we need to know quickly.”

  And that’s how I ended up working two weeks of lates with Oakes and Brinkley, the only others in the ‘inner sanctum’. Tony Oakes – a man I would not trust with my pet rabbit, and Rob Brinkley, quite possibly the world’s dullest individual.

  9.

  I need to take a break. In my head this was a simple story – it was going to take me half an hour, yet now I come to write it, to actually commit it to paper – or my laptop, anyway - it’s growing. There’s more to tell, more that’s important. I’ll try to stick to it.

  Power’s fine for the moment by the way – don’t know if that’s something else that’s on automatic. I guess it would be one of the quarantined areas – somewhere on the emergency list of services to be kept running under all circumstances. Even these. Not sure what I’ll do when – if - it fails. Don’t want to think about that.

  10.

  We had a system – broke the samples down by product, date and source location. There were ready-meals, packets of minced meat, and cooked stuff like sausage rolls and pasties and whatnot. We had cling-filmed school dinners in a huge aluminium trays and huge vats from hospitals and old people’s homes. All frozen in huge walk-in freezer. It came in on wagons – for the first few days we nearly gave up, we were getting through it at a tenth the rate it was arriving, but once we got up and running it ran smoother and the results on the spread-sheets grew. Once we had some data to play with it became a bit more interesting.

  The first thing we
tested was the horse DNA, of course. Find the origin, they said. Not so easy. Oakes and me ran some comparisons – all from scratch, didn’t want to rely on what had already been done, bad practice that. ‘Always from first principles, Mr Kennedy. Empirical empirical empirical!’ – Professor Davies at Nottingham: terrible BO, he had. Meanwhile Brinkley boned up on horse DNA, we have access to all sorts of databases across the world. You really would not believe the papers people write on this stuff. Anyway, off we go logging all this data, meeting twice a day with Craddock to update him on progress – one with all of us, one just me and him. By the Friday we had enough data to start plotting and sure enough it’s looking like there’s a limited number of sources – breeds, I mean.

  Now this wasn’t surprising – if this was a wide-scale operation, which from the number of cases it must have been, common sources, cheaper breeds could be expected to be the norm. This wasn’t the odd old nag or faller at the first at Ascot; this was horsemeat on an industrial scale. It was played down in the press but from what came later it was pretty clear that the majority of the population had ingested it.

  Now Craddock is an arse, and rather than congratulate us he just moans that we haven’t done more.

  “What about disease – this tells me nothing about disease!” The man was obsessed. We need to work systematically, I say, get the basics out of