leave this place—where he really had no right to be—and forget everything that Nathan King had told him. Perhaps he had been drunk. Or maybe he and his friend had simply decided that it would be fun to mess with Tom, fuck with his mind.
He reached out again to touch the thing buried in the ground.
He should leave.
And as his fingers skimmed what he already knew to be a buried bone, he actually felt the world shifting around him. Whatever safety net he had been living with was ripped away, leaving the bare landscape of stark truths ready to pull him down and tear him to ribbons. Preconceptions of what was right and wrong, true or false, were suddenly questioned again. He had never truly believed most of what he had been told about Steven's death, but he realised with a jolt that he had never imagined his own idea of the story. Perhaps it would have been too terrible. Now, everything he knew could be a lie. There was no safety in the world anymore. He was in his mid- fifties, and his childhood was at an end.
Tom stroked his finger across the pitted surface. I could be touching my son right now. There was a definite curve to the bone. A skull. He came to the crack and, using his thumbnail, scraped out the moss. Then he moved his fingers down to where the skull entered the ground, pushed, found that he could slip his fingers in quite easily. He worked them deeper, feeling the coolness of damp soil on one side and the smooth, slick skull on the other. He pulled, tugged, and his hand came free with a clump of earth attached. Tom dug again, using both hands this time, amazed at how easily the soil moved. He pulled away an area of heather around the buried skull, lifting soil as it came, and soon he had built a small pile of the purple-flowered shrub. He sat back panting, glanced down at his hands, realised how filthy he was already and how worried Jo might be, but he went back to work at the ground around the skull, the depression deepening with every handful of earth he removed.
Tom suddenly remembered the shovel and the going became easier. He threw the soil behind him, not wishing to pile it up in case he had to move it again. He placed the shovel, stood on it, pressed down, bent and heaved up another load. He took care not to work too close to the skull so he would not damage it. That could be Steven down there … or maybe there were more, the remains of fifteen men buried deep after being killed by whatever had escaped from Porton Down.
Tom paused and looked at his hands, the mud beneath his nails, the muck already ground into the creases between his fingers. Whatever they had died from could still be here. Plague? Some dreadful chemical warfare agent? It could be eating into him right now, entering his bloodstream and revelling in this unexpected new victim. He closed his eyes. He felt no different, other than the fact that he was digging up a secret mass grave close to a biological warfare establishment.
He laughed out loud, fell to his knees and held his stomach. The shovel dropped and landed in the hole he had created, clanking against the top of the skull, and Tom's laughter turned to tears. Tears for himself, for Jo, for Steven buried somewhere beneath him. He could turn and leave, accept the truth now that the lie was revealed, get on with his life; or he could carry on digging. He had come this far.
My son's corpse? Do I really want to see that? His skeleton, his skull, whatever is left of his skin? He looked up at the rising sun, squinting, seeing no answers there.
'It's madness,' he said, and the sound of his own voice startled him into action. He picked up the shovel and worked around the skull.
A few minutes later he revealed the first eye socket. Tom backed away and slid around the hole to work at the back of the skull. He had no wish to be watched. He knelt and used his hands again, and minutes later they tangled in a chain. Tom cursed as he felt the metal pinch his finger, but then he tugged gently at the chain around the skeleton's neck, bringing the dog tags up into the sun for the first time in a decade. He did not question why they were still there, why they had not been removed, the panic that this suggested in the men who had buried the bodies. He could not. Because here, at last, was a name.
His heart thumped as he spat on the metal and cleaned away the muck. He scraped with his thumbnail, revealing the letters and numbers, sobbing as he did so. Tears blurred his vision and he wiped them away, smearing mud across his face.
Gareth Morgan. This was not his son.
Tom kept digging around the skeleton, not so careful now that he knew it was not Steven. He was sweating, his clothes stuck to his body with sweat and grime, and his heart was hammering from the exertion. He thought of Jo again and how worried and afraid she would be right now, but this was for her as well, this truth he was uncovering out here on the Plain. But could he tell her? Even if he found Steven's corpse would he be able to tell her? That was something he would have to overcome should the situation arise.
Bastards! Anger filtered in past the shock. The bastards, killed our sons and lied to us about it! The significance of this weighed heavy, and the implications of what he was doing suddenly felt so much more serious. If he was captured doing this—uncovering a scandal that could very well explode the heart of the British government—what would be done? Would he simply be added to the hole before it was filled in again?
He stood, looked around, saw the buzzards still circling high overhead, then carried on digging.
Around the remains of the stranger called Gareth Morgan the soil suddenly became loose, and Tom stumbled as it fell into a hollow with a rush. As his foot sank in, he dropped the shovel and spread his arms, falling onto his rump beside the skull. Mass grave, he thought, and then the smell hit him. Wet rot, decay, age, not the smell of the recently dead but the stench of time. He leaned back and pulled his foot free, rolling across the disturbed ground away from the new hole and the smell drifting up from it. He closed his eyes and buried his face in heather, breathing in the muddy freshness of it, trying to clear the smell of his son's death from his lungs.
'Oh for fuck's sake,' Tom said, suddenly sobbing into the ground. He had no idea what he was doing. His hands clawed, fingers dug in, as if afraid that he would fall off the world if he loosened his grip. And wasn't he doing that already? So much had changed in the last hour that he would not be surprised to open his eyes and find the world spinning the opposite way. Smelling the honest peaty smell of the ground beneath him, he wished that he had never overheard those two men in the pub.
But he had. And King had given him the map, and now here he was. Looking for his dead son.
Tom crawled back to the skeleton—revealed to its chest now that the soil around it had tumbled into a hollow—and stared down at what he had done. There were other bones visible down there, touched by sunlight for the first time in years. The corpses must have been piled in together, covered over with a layer of soil and heathers, and as their flesh rotted away beneath the ground it left hollows behind, dark wet spaces filled with nothing but the gas of decay and the undying echoes of their violent deaths. The skeleton called Gareth Morgan still wore the remnants of a uniform, and shreds of leathery skin clung to its bones, moist and browned by the damp soil. Beneath it a tangle of bones and clothing, skin and hair, marked where other bodies had found their final resting place.
'Oh God,' Tom muttered, reaching down into the dark. 'Oh God, oh God …' He could taste decay on his tongue, sweet yet vile. He wondered whether each body smelled different in decomposition, and if so which smell was his son.
But death was the great equaliser. Personality had no part in rot. Humour or seriousness held no truck with the processes of bacteria and decay. Steven was long gone from here, yet Tom had never felt so close.
He slid on the wet soil and moved forward, his outstretched arm sinking deeper into the void. He cried out in alarm but came to a stop, his hand closing around a clammy bone. He pulled gently but there was no give. The shovel was under his stomach, and he eased it out and used the blade to shift more of the soil above the grave. It took little effort now, and by kneeling up he found he could simply push the heather to one side like a carpet, revealing the horrors of what lay beneath.
Sunlight struck the bones. Subtle autumn heat ate away the coolness of their decade-long rest. The buzzards cried out and drifted away, perhaps sensing death even from such a height. Tom knelt among the rotted corpses of so many men and looked up, welcoming the sun on his face and the sense of his skin stretching and burning. 'Jo,' he said, but she did not answer him. 'Steven.' Still no answer. Tears dripped from his chin and disappeared among the bodies, perhaps cleaning small spots on his son's bones.
Shaking his head, his whole body shivering, fear and shock and rage combining to draw his mind back from what he was doing, Tom bent over and reached back into the grave.
For just a few seconds the madness of this reached down and clasped Tom's hand. It was his wife holding him, whispering into his ear, telling him to let go because they still had each other, and no matter how Steven had died it was only the living that really mattered now. But Tom let go of her hand and held onto what he was doing. His belief that perhaps he and Jo had too much of each other reared up again, a selfish justification. And as Jo's
