"Oh shit." The full import of what he was doing suddenly hit him. His knees felt weak, his stomach rolled and his balls tingled with fear. What if he was caught? What would he say? How could the truth possibly help him, when it had always been the army keeping the truth for itself?
Tom knew that there was only one way to confront his doubt and fears; he moved on. He counted his paces. There was little to see on the small map, so the only way he could approximate his location was by estimating how far he had come from the fence. He crossed the small stream, and that at least gave him a point of reference. When he had come over half a mile into the military zone he paused, looked around, consulted the small map again, ran his fingertips over the indent of the red cross, and saw something that would change his life forever.
At first he thought it was a small rock buried in the ground, its matte surface pitted by years of frost and sunshine. There was a hint of yellow to it, and one edge was badly cracked, a thin line of moss growing there. As he moved closer a feeling of dread came down, sending a chill through him even though the autumn sun fought to hold it back.
It can't be.
Tom closed the map, crumpled the piece of paper, leaned on the shovel as he eased himself to the ground. Kneeling, he was that much closer to the object. He reached out to touch it, but one of the buzzards called out high above. He sat back on his heels and looked up. The bird was circling him, and if he was not so scared he would have laughed at the outrageous symbolism of this.
He leaned forward and touched the buried object, and it was not a rock.
Something happened then, a momentary realisation that this was the point at which he could change his future. Jo would be wondering where he was. She had been sick, he had been away for a couple of hours already, and that provoked a cool sense of guilt. She would be sitting up in bed reading, perhaps having made herself a cup of tea, and after each paragraph her eyes would flit to the bedside clock, then back again. Soon she would check the time after every line, and then perhaps she would not be able to read at all. He should go to her. He should 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.