CHAPTER I

John Hazard had just started on the pile of first-year essays when there was a rap on the lab door. He didn’t get the chance to say, “Come in.” Steve Pearlman wasn’t the type to wait for an invitation; he was already inside.

Instead, Hazard said, “No. Absolutely not. I told you last time—never again.”

“Hi, Doc,” Pearlman said, breezily. “Got something here that will interest you.” The young man reached into the leather pouch attached to his belt and pulled out a folded map, which he threw on the desk while he rummaged around for something more deeply buried.

Pearlman was in his full ecowarrior regalia: faded blue jeans that probably hadn’t been washed for a month, a fawn sweater so thick and lumpy it might have been knitted with chopsticks, and mud-spattered Doc Martens. His blond hair was no longer in dreadlocks, but it looked less tidy than ever.

Steve Pearlman had been Hazard’s tutee during the three years he had spent at the university, notionally studying ecology. Hazard hadn’t seen a lot of him in the lab or the lecture theatre but had been forced to spend time with him at the beginning and end of every term to discuss the various complaints that invariably accumulated. It had been a great relief to Hazard when Pearlman had actually contrived to get a third-class degree; he hadn’t expected to see or hear from him again after the post-graduation piss-up—Pearlman wasn’t the kind of student who required his teachers to produce references for dozens of different jobs—but he hadn’t been so lucky.

Although Pearlman had never shown overmuch interest in entomology while he’d been studying, the veterans of Crookham Heath had taught him that academics had their uses, and the prospect of the battle of Egypt Mill had sent him scurrying back to his alma mater in search of someone prepared to pose an expert on the habits of hawk moths. Hazard was a beetle man, but he’d been so flattered that he’d agreed to appear at the press conference set up to argue that the area between Egypt Mill and Cramborne Barrow ought to be designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest and that the railway line north of Sutton station ought not to be diverted across it in order to allow the road to be widened.

Unfortunately, the tabloid press had decided to take the other side, and Hazard’s name had been an open invitation to pun-hungry headline-mongers. By the time the battle of Egypt Mill was over, ending in victory for “the Establishment” and the bulldozers had actually moved in, Hazard felt as if he’d done a stint on the Somme in 1914. His Head of Department, the venerable Professor Pilkington, and the Dean of the Faculty had been seriously displeased by the damage he’d supposedly done to his department’s reputation for objectivity and scientific seriousness. Pilkington had suggested, as tactfully as he was capable of doing so, that Hazard ought to steer clear of environmentalist campaigning in future. Hazard hadn’t found that difficult, in conscientious terms, not because he didn’t think that the future of the environment was a burning issue of the day, but because he had other things to think about that were far closer to home.

A full thirty seconds had passed by the time Pearlman found what he was searching for in the bottom of his bag. He hauled out a plastic specimen-bottle a little longer and a little thicker than a tube of Smarties, which he passed to Hazard. It was full of small beetles—at least a hundred of them.

The insects had probably been alive when Pearlman had scooped them into the tube, but crowding and lack of air had done for most of them by now. Hazard released the cap in order to provide belated relief for the survivors, but he was careful not to let any escape on to his desk. He fetched a large Petri dish from a cupboard and tipped them into that instead.

The beetles weren’t all the same species, but most of them were very similar. Hazard didn’t require a magnifying glass to identify the dominant genus, although he suspected that he’d need a microscope to figure out exactly how many species were represented.

“Tenebrio, except for three or four undersized carabids and a couple of others,” he told his unwanted visitor. “Common as muck. Closely related to my Tribolium, except that these aren’t specialist grain-beetles—general omnivores, fond of decaying leaves in Autumn, although they won’t turn up their noses at fresh vegetable matter, and the adults are perfectly willing to prey on weaker invertebrates, including their own larvae. Thanks to the favors of agriculture, Tenebrio species are the most cosmopolitan of all beetles, although most of their immediate cousins prefer a warmer and drier climate. They’re farmed in their own right because their larvae are used as fishing bait—mealworms, they’re called.”

“I knew they weren’t woodworm beetles,” Pearlman replied, cheerfully. “I wish I could say that you taught me that, but I had plenty of opportunity to get acquainted with that kind of critter when I was at the squat in Curzon Street.”

“Some Tenebrionidae are wood-borers,” Hazard told him, holding the specimen tube up to the light and peering at the interior, trying to find something more interesting than he’d so far seen, “but none of these guys have the jaws for it. Look, Steve, I can’t see the point. They’re perfectly ordinary species—pests, even—and even if they weren’t, they’d be no help to the cause. The hawk moth fiasco must have taught you that no self-respecting tabloid will ever go out on a limb for an insect. Newts maybe—but even that colony of snails on Twyford Down was simply relocated. There’s not a single instance on record of a road development being stopped, even at the pie-in-the-sky stage, for the sake of an insect—and this one has to be way past the pie-in-the-sky stage if the Friends have mobilized the Last-Ditch Brigade.”

“It’s not actually a brigade at present,” Pearlman confessed. “Hardly a platoon, so far. Even the Friends don’t think this one is worth fighting, but that’s because they don’t have any domino players on the steering committee. English Nature are prepared to take a stand to defend the relict hedges, but for some reason they don’t seem to care that much about pocket-sized patches of woodland. Tenebrio are what they call darkling beetles, aren’t they?”

Hazard’s eyebrows went up in response to the revelation that Steve Pearlman actually knew what a darkling beetle was. “You’ve already shown these to someone else, haven’t you?” he said.

“I can use a library,” Pearlman retorted, as he picked up the map again and unfolded it.

It was just a road map, not an ordnance survey map—but that made a sort of sense, given that Steve Pearlman’s vocation was trying to make sure that today’s road maps didn’t go out of date as fast as earlier editions. The makeshift army he’d joined had been so successful back in the nineties, in the wake of the Newbury Bypass War, that no brand new road had been built for a decade within a hundred miles—but that had only served to shift the conflict into a new phase. Road widening was all the rage now that the twenty-first century was under way, and it was very difficult for the protesters to defend sites that already sat alongside significant traffic arteries on the grounds that they were gifted with “Outstanding Natural Beauty” or constituted significant refuges for endangered indigenous wildlife. The tide of public opinion that had briefly got behind the conservationists was dead against them now. It was nearly twenty years since Opération Satanique’s sinking of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior had helped to fuel a world-scale backlash of resentment against the Juggernaut of Progress, and enviromentalists were nowadays widely considered, at least in South-East England, as defenders of pests, and as pests themselves. Everybody but the Friends of the Earth’s “Last-Ditch Brigade” figured that the inevitable cost of not building any new roads was making the most of the ones that already existed.

“There’s the new battlefield,” said Pearlman, passing Hazard the map.

Hazard looked at the place where the younger man’s finger was pointing and frowned. “That’s the A303,” he said. “I didn’t know they had any plans to widen the A303 this year.”

“They don’t,” said Pearlman. “They’re widening this one, here.”

Hazard had to squint to see it. The “road” that Pearlman was indicating was so small that it didn’t even have a B-number. “But it doesn’t go anywhere,” he said.

“Yes it does,” said Pearlman. “It goes to Tenebrion Farm. Tenebrion Farm’s in the Domesday Book—I got a friend to check that on line. So far as I can tell, it was a thriving enterprise from the eleventh century all the way through to the nineteenth; then it began to fade, partly because of soil depletion and partly because its owners couldn’t or wouldn’t fall in with new fashions. It got left behind by the Agricultural Revolution. Its owners tried to catch up in the early twentieth, trying all kinds of supposedly scientific means of fertilization and pest control, but they couldn’t restore the fundamental fecundity of the soil and never quite caught up with more efficient and effective competitors. It must have been losing money for generations, save for periods of relief during the world wars and a brief boost when the Common Agricultural Policy gave it a new lease of economic life.

“If the last owner had switched entirely into cereals and rapeseed he might have scraped by, but he didn’t. As a penultimate gamble, he built up his dairy herd, just in time to catch BSE and the supermarket price-lock, and the whole operation crashed. He tried a few desperation measures after that—the lunatic even tried switching to potatoes at one stage—but nothing could stem the cash-hemorrhage, and he eventually had to sell up, in a buyer’s market. That was when another kind of speculator in, seemingly convinced that housing need in the region had become so urgent that Green Belt regulations would soon be swept away and the eastern edge of Salisbury Plan would become a developers’ Klondike. He and all his breed are still waiting, like the Sword of Damocles, for the first few threads of the suspending cord to give way—and this looks like being one of them, unless we can stop it.”

“We, in this instance, meaning you and a few of your acolytes?” Hazard suggested.

Steve Pearlman, as a supposed anarchist, did like the term acolytes, but he was in full flow and didn’t want to pause to argue terminology.

“All the would-be developer could get planning permission to do initially,” Pearlman explained, “was revamp the actual farm buildings and their immediate dependencies as a ‘modern hamlet,’ but there were three big barns as well as a row of workmen’s cottages. He’s already converted the lot into dwellings, with the encouragement of a local council that had been ordered by Central Government to make provision for 600 extra homes in the next five years. The houses were snapped up in advance of completion and nobody’s moved in yet, although the developer and some of his workers have been staying on site, preparing for the final phase, which includes the widening of the road. If that goes ahead, Tenebrion Farm becomes a potential village ripe for expansion. At present, the glorified cart-track connecting it to the A303 isn’t even wide enough for two cars to pass one another. That didn’t matter while the farmer was driving his tractors back and forth, but the reason the developer built the houses before widening the road was to create what your bog-standard planning application calls a pressing need for improvement. It worked—and once the road is widened, the case for building more houses becomes stronger—and so on, one domino at a time.”

While Pearlman was talking Hazard had worked out how his ex-student had found out that Tenebrio was a darkling beetle. Given his ideological suspicion of computers—although he needed a mobile phone for communication in the field—he had presumably taken the name of the farm to the dictionary and the Britannica in a library. The name of a farm recorded in the Domesday Book couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the name assigned to a beetle in the Linnaean classification, but Tenebrio was so cosmopolitan that you could probably find specimens on every farm in England if you could be bothered to look. Pearlman had obviously bothered to look—but Hazard still couldn’t see what good it was going to do him.

“Well,” the entomologist said, carefully, as he put the cap back on the specimen tube and handed it back to the ex-student, “it seems to me that the developer has a good case. Presumably, you’re worried about the possibility that once the road is viable, he’ll start angling to build more houses either side of it.”

“That’s how it will begin,” Pearlman said. “The real point, though, if you’re capable of thinking further ahead, is that the A303 offers an easy connection to the M3. Look to the north, at that cluster of new housing developments west of Hurstbourne Priors. At present, their access roads all connect to the A343, which means that the local yuppies have to make their way over to the M4 in order to head for London, with Newbury sprawling right across their path. The bypass was supposed to make that access easier, of course, but that was more than ten years ago. It’s Nightmare Junction now—but once the cart track connecting Tenebrion to the A303 is a real road, the temptation to extend it northwards to give the villagers an alternative way out will become enormous: again, a supposedly urgent need, of the kind that serves as a battering-ram for planning applications.

“The New Tenebrionites won’t necessarily like that, of course—all they’ll probably want is to be a nice cozy cul-de-sac—but you can bet your pension that the developer always had it in mind. He understands the domino principle, if no one else does. Once he’s got the go-ahead to expand his modern hamlet into a modern village he’s going to send his bulldozers northwards to plant the spine of a whole bloody town. That’s why the battle’s worth fighting, and why it’s strategically vital to fight it here and now, between the farm and the A-road. The strip to either side of the road’s mostly fenced rather than being supplied with hedgerow, like the farmland edging the A303, but there’s a little patch of woodland just here that must have been there from the very beginning, untouched by the hand of cultivation at least since the Norman invasion, and probably since Roman times. The Domesday Book identifies it as Tenebrion Wood—my bet is that the farm was named after it.

“It’s not entirely untouched,” Hazard said, raising the specimen tube. “No matter how long Tenebrion Wood’s been there, these Tenebrio species are invaders, carried into the British Isles with European grains. They might have adapted to local produce, but they’re no more native to the wood than you are. I suppose you’ve considered the argument that setting up tree houses, digging tunnels and getting ready to fight a pitched battle against the developer’s so-called security men will completely wreck the fragile ecology of your precious wood, and that even if you did save it from the bulldozers—which you won’t—you’d destroy it completely in the process. Anyway, as I already told you, I’m not getting involved. I can’t afford the hassle.”

“That’s what they’ll put on the ecosphere’s tombstone,” Pearlman said, predictably. “We might have saved it, but we couldn’t afford the hassle. I just want you to take a look, Doc. I just want you to stroll around the site, and tell me whether there’s anything better than darkling beetles there—anything we can actually use to start a propaganda war that might get us into the Nationals, or even on TV. It’s an exceptional site in more ways than one.”

“How, exactly?”

“From the outside it looks like an inextricable tangle, and probably was until the developer got his own surveyor in to make an ecological report, trying to outsmart us before we could get our own campaign off the ground. The surveyor cut a path straight into the heart—convenient for us, in a way, but…well, the thing is that there’s a hole in the middle of the wood.”

“A clearing, you mean?”

“If you like. I think he already knew it was there—there’ve been planes taking aerial photographs for the Ordnance Survey department for years, and the gap must have looked odd on the pics. I’ve been trying to get my hands on some, but even though the Freedom of Information Act came into force years ago, you still have to cut through layers of red tape to get anything out of official channels, even from a backwater like the OS. Anyway, there’s a funny hole in the wood, and I can’t work out why. You might be able to.”

Hazard was an entomologist, not a dendrologist or soil scientist, but he figured that he probably knew enough general biology to make a guess as to why the mysterious clearing hadn’t been colonized by the wood, once he had got a look at it…except that he didn’t want to look at it.

“What does the developer’s report say about it?” he asked.

Pearlman laughed. “As if the developer or his hireling would give us the time of day, let alone useful information!” he said.

“I take it that it wasn’t one of my immediate colleagues who carried out the ecosurvey?”

“No, they got someone out from London—Imperial, I think. Name of Nordley. Do you know him?”

“Only by name. He’s a plant ecologist.”

“Good. That means you might well spot something he didn’t, animal-wise. Anyway, the clearing seems to be beetle heaven. I scooped that lot up from Moley’s soil-heap in with a single sweep of the tube, before the twilight had completely faded.”

“Soil-heap?” Hazard queried. He knew that Moley was the nom-de-guerre of one of the “sappers” who had dug tunnels prior to the battle of Egypt Mill. “You’ve already gone to ground, then?”

“No, it was just a test dig. Moley reckons the clearing’s no good for tunneling—the ground’s not firm enough. He says he’ll try to get down through the tree-roots nearer to the edge of the wood, but it won’t be easy. We could really do with digging in, though—the trees are mostly stunted, not exactly the stately oaks of England. Difficult to establish ourselves above head height.”

“Not the ideal battleground for stubborn protest, then?”

“Far from it. That’s why we need all the clout we can get in publicity terms. We need to make a fuss, mobilize opinion against the Evil Developer. You don’t have to lead the charge—just take a look around and give us the benefit of your expertise, in terms of ammunition we can use.”

“I’ve just given you my expert opinion,” Hazard told him, flatly—but then he hesitated. “You say you got these from a heap of soil excavated from a dig?”

“Yes. There were a lot more.”

“But these aren’t burrowers. They can’t have come out of the hole.”

“Maybe not—if they didn’t, the certainly flocked to the stuff that Moley had pulled out, like flies to shit. After food, maybe?”

“They’re versatile beetles, but they don’t eat soil,” Hazard said, contemptuously.

“Maybe soil-heap wasn’t the right expression,” Pearlman countered. “Looked like rotting vegetable matter to me—you said that’s what they like. As I said, it was too soft for tunneling. Organic mud. Humus, if my memory serves me right, is the technical term. Surface, subsoil, substratum and all that crap. ”

Obviously, some elements of learning had stuck in the graduate’s mind.

“You’re exaggerating about the one sweep, though?” Hazard queried. “They’re not shy of crowds, but if you got more than a hundred Tenebrio in one scoop, there must have been thousands.”

“There were,” Pearlman confirmed. “They hadn’t been there long, though—they must have come rushing from all directions, heading for the stuff Moley had shifted like lemmings off a Norwegian cliff—though not, presumably, to commit suicide.”

“That’s a myth,” Hazard said, reflexively. “Lemmings don’t commit mass suicide. That film clip they used to use in anti-smoking ads is a fraud.”

Pearlman shrugged his shoulders. He was too young to remember the ad in question. Anti-smoking campaigns had gone through several more phases since then.

“Come and take a look, Doc,” he said. “We need you. One day, you know, the front line will reach your back yard, and you’ll be screaming for my help.”

“My back yard is a cemetery,” Hazard told him.

“I know,” said Pearlman. “How’s that going, by the way?”

Hazard knew that it wasn’t a real question—it was just the ex-student’s pathetic attempt to reinforce a very tenuous social bond. Even so, his jaw tightened, and he knew that his mouth must be forming a grimace.

Obsessed as he was with his own agenda, the younger man evidently noticed the reaction. “Not well, then?” he said. “Country living not living up to expectations, in spite of living next door to all those lovely insects?”

“None of your business,” Hazard snapped, before he could stop himself.

Pearlman’s eyebrows raised. “Sorry, Doc,” he said. “Didn’t know there was a sore spot there, or I’d have been sure not to touch it. Anyway, it doesn’t make any difference to the argument. Just because you’re living in a redundant vicarage next to a derelict churchyard surrounded by successfully-cultivated fields, it doesn’t mean that you’re safe in your little Green Belt niche. Take anther look at the map. Even if living next to that folly isn’t as much fun as you thought it would be, you won’t want to go down the slippery slope that will open if and when they connect your little lane to the A33—and they’ll do it. Inch by inch, barn by barn, cart-track by cart-track and wood by wood, they’ll worm their way in. Just take a look at my sticking point—that’s all I’m asking.”

“It’s pointless,” said Hazard, conscious that his protest sounded weak.

“It’s got to be better than marking first-year essays,” Pearlman retorted, having cast a rapid glance over the papers heaped on the desk. “It’s coming on summertime, and I’ll bet you haven’t been out in the field since September last, or even spent much time in your beloved churchyard. Now I think about it, you’re looking distinctly peaky—not your old buoyant self at all, and the washed-out look only suits the gaunt and the lanky. You’ve put on weight, haven’t you?”

Hazard could have taken offense at that; he was well aware that his lack of height and slightly fuller figure did not lend itself to Byronic depression—although Byron himself had hardly been anorexic, to judge by his portraits. His efforts to slim down and get back to the weight he’s had at twenty had, however, been well-and-truly torpedoed by his personal troubles. He knew that comfort eating was unhealthy, but snacking gave him something to do when time and isolation began to weigh on him, as they did far too often nowadays. He suspected that he had put on more than a few pounds since Jenny had left—but he wasn’t about to discuss that with Steve Pearlman. All in all, he thought a dignified silence the best response.

“A day out will do you good, Doc, even if you don’t find anything,” Pearlman persisted. “And who knows? That wood was virgin territory until last week, when Nordley’s thugs took a machete to it. I’m sorry you can’t be the first person to set foot in it for two thousand years, but surely it’s worth a look anyway. You need some fresh air, and it won’t cost you anything except time you can spare—I know full well you count your bloody beetles in the mornings, and teaching must have virtually stopped for the exam season. Until the serious marking starts flooding in and you have to get down to pathetic wrangling over exactly which level of meaningless qualification you have to give the cannon fodder, you’re your own man. The iceberg’s already in sight, Doc, and it’s no time to be playing quoits on the deck of the Titanic. I know it’s a long shot, and that even if you do find something that could help make an argument of sorts for SSI status, it might not do us any good, but we have to try, for fuck’s sake. I’m begging you, Doc. Just take a look.”

Hazard could feel his resistance melting away. Summer was coming on, and he hadn’t been in the field since the start of the autumn term. In fact, he’d been doing everything on automatic pilot for weeks, stunned by the collapse of his marriage and his life. Even if there was nothing to see in Tenebrion Wood but a stupid clearing and darkling beetles, it would make a change, and a change suddenly didn’t seem like such a bad idea.

“Tomorrow’s Friday,” he said, finally. “In spite of your contempt for the summer term timetable, I’m teaching from two to three, but I can wrap things up for the weekend after that. I can probably reach you by four-thirty, traffic permitting.”

“Today would be a lot better,” the ecowarrior retorted, unable to suppress a wide grin of self-satisfaction. “The beetles seem to come out in force at dusk. If we go now, you could give me a lift.”

As a good Friend of the Earth, Pearlman didn’t own a car, but he had no objection to cadging lifts from anyone and everyone.

“Tomorrow,” said Hazard, flatly. He figured that he’d made enough compromises for one day, and, perverse as it might seem, he wanted to finish the marking now that he’d started, and get it out of the way.

“I can live with that,” said Pearlman, who was apparently prepared to be generous now that he’s got what he wanted. “You can leave your car in the lay-by west of the turn-off—it’s a good three-quarters of a mile from there to the wood, but the walk will do you good. Bring your wellies—I don’t know why it’s so muddy, as we haven’t had undue quantities of rain recently, but it is. In fact, now I come to think about it, if you insist on making it tomorrow, you can give someone else a lift. I’ll tell her to come round to your lab at three, shall I?”

“Who’s her?” Hazard asked, suspiciously.

“Lady from History—Margaret Dunstable.”

Hazard’s eyes flicked reflexively to the bookshelf above his desk. “Margaret Dunstable?” he queried, genuinely astonished.

Pearlman misinterpreted the reason for his reaction. “Believe me,” he said, “I tried to get someone more respectable, but the entire Archeology department turned me down flat, and I couldn’t get a flicker out of anyone else in History, even with the aid of the magic words Domesday Book. Anyway, she’s not as crazy as she’s made out to be.”

“She’s not crazy at all,” Hazard corrected him. “She’s probably the sanest person in that entire faculty—which is why they all hate her. But what the hell do you expect her to do for you?”

“God only knows,” Pearlman admitted. “But like I say, she was the only volunteer I could find. If you can’t find me any rare and arguable precious wildlife, I reckon our best chance is to play the antiquity card. That wood hadn’t been touched for two thousand years until the developer send his hired vandals in. If something that old isn’t something worth conserving, what is? I wanted a historian to help me play the Domesday Book card—a real historian, not just some twat who spends his time sifting through documents of one or other of the World Wars…someone who knows what a druid was, and cares.”

It was on the tip of Hazard’s tongue to say that if Pearlman had read Margaret Dunstable’s work, he would know that nobody knew what a druid was, and that everything people thought they knew about them was just a tissue of fantasies, but he refrained.

“Okay,” he said. “I guess I can do that.” It seemed to him, in fact, to be a better reason to take a trip to Tenebrion Wood than looking for exotic insects that he was highly unlikely to find. Margaret Dunstable qualified as rare and precious wildlife in her own right, and even though she and Hazard had been colleagues of a sort for the seven years he’d been at the university, and might even have been in the same room half a dozen times, he had never exchanged two words with her. The Faculties simply didn’t mix, except on formal occasions that were extremely unconducive to any authentic meeting and greeting.

“You really don’t mind?” said Pearlman. It wasn’t really a question; he was just surprised that a hard-headed scientist—even an entomologist—would be willing to let an ancient historian notorious for her scholarly unorthodoxy into his car.

“Not in the least,” Hazard assured him. He didn’t add any further explanation. He didn’t see any necessity to counter the younger man’s astonishment with excuses.

“I’ll tell her to come at three, then,” the eco-warrior repeated. “Thanks. I mean it, Doc—I really do appreciate it.”

“Well, Steve, if there’s ever anything you can do for me,” Hazard said, “I’ll be sure to let you know.”