45

By the time I had run back to the house, it wasn’t just the physical exertion that had me hot and fuming. The more I thought about it, the more incensed I was that some two-faced, slimy old bastard could have killed Gaby for the sake of a lump or two of cattle beast and the potentially nasty financial consequences of BSE. I wondered what price he had put on her life. Was there a monetary value which made it possible for him to crunch the numbers and think, ‘Yep, it’s worth me killing her’? But no, technically speaking, he did not kill Gaby; he was too lily-livered to do the deed himself and had paid someone else to do his dirty work. I bet that fit into the monthly ledger tidily: ‘Payment to hit man’. Described as what? ‘Professional pest-removal services’? ‘Acme bug eradication’?

By now I didn’t give a toss that Paul Frost was having a day off. I stormed into the house and headed straight for the phone. I punched in the numbers and waited for it to ring, but instead the phone skipped straight to his message service.

‘Damn it all.’ I hurled the phone straight into the sofa cushions.

‘My, my, that was very adult.’

I turned to see Maggie in her bedroom doorway, still clutching her novel. I just scowled at her, then picked up the phone and, with exaggerated calmness, hit redial. I listened to the pre-recorded voice with the American accent, and the beep, and I obediently left a message.

‘Paul, it’s Sam Shephard. I have some vital information for you. Please call me as soon as you get this. It’s urgent.’

‘That was better,’ she said, and headed over towards me. ‘What’s happened?’

What hadn’t happened? I sat the phone down on the table and tried to sort my thoughts and questions into some logical order.

‘What can you tell me about BSE testing?’

Maggie’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Here?’ she asked, pointing at the ground. ‘That’s a pretty heavy-duty question. Do you think BSE has got something to do with all of this?’

‘Maybe, yes, I don’t know.’

‘OK, well, sit down.’ She pulled up a chair. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Does the plant do random screening? When do you test for it?’

Maggie thought for a moment before replying.

‘No random screening. A few years ago we did targeted testing based on an animal’s age and how they’d died – you know, if they’d been dead in the yard or were emergency slaughter, that kind of thing. I take it there’s a point to all this?’

‘Yes, there’s a point, but humour me for now. What testing do you do – you know, how’s it done?’

‘The test involves taking a sample of brain-stem tissue, which is prepared and preserved and then sent away for examination. Prionics Western Blot test, if you want to know the official jargon. BSE is what’s called a prion disease.’

‘So burning an animal’s carcass would prevent you getting a sample?’

‘Not necessarily. It would depend on how badly it was damaged. It certainly would make it more difficult. Are you going to tell me what’s going on?’

My mind was a whirr. I wanted to clarify a few more points before I enlightened her.

‘Soon, my impatient friend. What about BSE testing on imported animals?’

‘Imports? There wouldn’t be any; I mean, there wouldn’t be any imports. No one’s been able to bring live animals into the country since at least the nineties, probably before then even, the mid-eighties, say, because of the BSE disaster in Britain and Europe. I think you can bring them in from Australia under special circumstances, because Aussie’s guaranteed BSE free too, but not from anywhere else.’

Bugger. That’s where my theory of an outbreak on Trev’s farm fell over. Trev’s import would have been years ago, decades ago. Surely they’d have noticed if the beast had symptoms of BSE before now.

‘Damn, that scotches that theory.’ I rubbed at my forehead. ‘OK, what about testing on an imported beast way back whenever? Say, twenty plus years ago?’

‘Any imported beast would have had the Western Blot test performed as a matter of protocol. In fact, the Ministry went to the trouble of tracking every single one. Just who are we talking about here?’

I relieved Maggie’s curiosity.

‘Trevor Ray had a stud bull imported from, I think, Britain. It would have been years and years ago, but I was thinking it may have come over with BSE and infected other beasts and – la, la, la.’ I illustrated the la, la, la with hand actions. ‘Anyway, I must have been wrong. I can’t see how it could possibly lead to an outbreak now.’

‘Did you say Trevor Ray?’

‘Yeah, Trev.’

‘And am I leaping a bit too far here to think you suspect him of killing Gaby because of a BSE scare on his farm?’

‘Well, that’s kind of what I was thinking. When I was out on my run I came across a pile of burning carcasses that had had their ear tags removed, so were unidentifiable. They’d have to be the same animals that were reported stolen from Trev’s and Phillip Rawlings’ farms, and so I put two and two together and got rather more than four, as you do.’ It all seemed pretty preposterous now.

Maggie actually laughed; she must have thought I’d really lost the plot. I sighed and moved to get up, but she reached over and grabbed my arm.

‘Sit, sit. I wasn’t laughing at you,’ she said. She must have read the despair on my face. ‘Let me tell you a little story about Trev that might help with your maths. When I first got the job in the lab, the supervisor, as one of his cautionary tales about risk management, talked about Trev and his bull – Casanova, I think it was.’

That name caused a flashback to the gallery of photos on his office wall.

‘Casanova was imported from Britain, for Trev’s breeding programme. He was brought in before the ban came into effect and that was fine. Under the national protocol, all imported beasts had to be monitored and then tested for BSE at slaughter or death, to be safe. That’s where it got interesting. The bull got very ill, to the point where Trev put it out of its misery: didn’t think, and did it the old-fashioned way with a bullet between the eyes. Well, did the shit hit the fan. This was an imported beast, so BSE testing was mandatory, but that was rather impossible now the thing’s brain had been mashed by a bullet. The bull, in actuality, had a serious kidney infection and that was listed as the cause of death, but not before Trev and his vet had signed affidavits saying that the beast had not displayed any of the signs of mad-cow disease – you know, staggering, tremors, odd behaviour.’

‘Hang on, hang on, hang on.’ The jumble of information in my head had begun to take some form. It was all starting to make a scary type of sense. ‘So Casanova could have had BSE but no one could confirm it.’

‘That’s right. Trev and his vet, who’d seen the bull reasonably often, vowed that it hadn’t displayed any symptoms. The carcass was disposed of according to protocol, but the brain tissue was too badly damaged to get a usable sample.’

‘And he had a kidney infection?’

‘Yes, it would have killed him, anyway. The kidneys were quite damaged apparently, so he must have had the disease for a while. Probably had some genetic predisposition.’

That snippet of information was the last piece that might support what had seemed a crazy idea.

‘Hear me out and tell me if this sounds too far-fetched. Gaby had been looking at a few webpages about BSE as well as TB. One of the pages – I remember it because the ramifications were pretty scary – was on a study of mice infected with scrapie, which is a similar disease…’

‘Yep, I know about scrapie, another prion disease.’

‘Yeah, anyway, these mice had kidney inflammation, and the end result was they excreted the infectious agent in their urine, and that then infected other mice.’

‘Shit,’ said Maggie. I could see her brain ticking away. ‘Extend that possibility to cattle and if Trev’s beast did have BSE, and it kept having kidney infections, it could have infected other cows.’ She was damned quick on the uptake.

‘Yes, but that would have had to have happened across several generations for us to have a current-day problem. And surely if they had BSE they’d display symptoms? Someone would have picked it up earlier.’ The argument still wouldn’t quite stack up.

‘Not necessarily so.’ Maggie was tapping her finger on the table like she always did when her brain was working overtime. ‘If we’re going to talk about remote possibilities, picture this: Casanova has mad-cow, has kidney inflammation, pees everywhere, infects other cattle. BSE has a hell of a long incubation period – we’re talking five-plus years – so what if none of these beasts showed clinical signs before they were sent to slaughter? Another what if: Casanova was a stud bull; chances are he was infecting some of his progeny, and they may also have inherited his kidney disorder. You see where this is going?’

Unfortunately, I could. ‘So they too had dodgy kidneys and, to put it how you so politely did, peed everywhere, infected more cattle. Oh my God, it is theoretically possible that mad-cow disease could have been passed down for generations and gone on for decades on Trev’s farm and no one would ever have known.’

It was a fantastic idea, and not in the good sense.

‘Theoretically,’ she said. ‘The odds would have to be incredible, but it is possible. If none of the animals displayed the staggers, you’d have no reason to suspect it. Especially in New Zealand, where we’ve never had an outbreak of anything nasty, and certainly not BSE.’

Another cog went clunk, and this one made me gasp. A dreadful thought had crept into my mind.

‘You OK?’ Maggie asked. ‘You’ve gone even pastier than usual.’

‘Maggie, tell me the symptoms of mad-cow disease – no, I mean the human version.’

She shot me a worried look. ‘You mean variant CJD?’

I gave her a nod.

‘In humans you would see staggering, tremor, odd behaviour, neurological symptoms.’ She looked apprehensive. ‘What are you thinking?’

‘Oh my God.’ I thought back to Trev tripping up steps, his shakes, being so emotional. I’d attributed it to alcohol, but what if it wasn’t? ‘I think Trev. He’d have killed the odd beast for home consumption. What if…? And what about Janice?’

And not just Janice either, there were the girls too. It didn’t bear thinking about.

‘There’s an even bigger “what if?” here,’ Maggie said, her face a strange combination of alarm and solemnity. ‘If this has been present for years, and no one has picked up anything wrong with his cattle, Trev’s stock would have gone to the works for slaughter as usual and we could have been eating it. Everyone could have been eating it.’

I suddenly felt very queasy.

‘That is one hell of a shit-scary thought.’

‘And that is one hell of an understatement.’

We both sat in silence for a while, our minds trying to digest the information.

‘Jesus Christ. Now what do I do? Those are some pretty serious theories based on very slim odds. Who would ever believe it?’

Maggie took it upon herself to reply.

‘Someone’s got to, unlikely as it may seem. You’ve done your bit, found all this out, now you’ve got to hand it over to the police.’

I looked at her sideways.

‘You know what I mean,’ she said. ‘The real police.’

I gave her a frown.

‘Stop it, you know what I mean.’