The Petitioners (4 page)

‘I can’t see how to put it on,’ he complained. Fiona went to have a look, and the two of them pressed and slid their fingers across every available surface.

‘Oh, give it to me!’ said Dan in the end, snatching it out from between them.

‘Don’t break it,’ I told him gently. It was nice to see him take a harmless interest in something, after all.

Three seconds later he had managed to activate some sort of alarm that wailed out its warning incongruously in the open air of the hills, causing a near-stampede of sheep after one of them panicked.

Fiona, Declan and Dan seemed to think it was very funny, after their initial surprise.

‘Now look what you’ve done!’ I said, picking it up from where Dan had flung it. I brushed off the sheep-droppings. It fell silent.

They were all staring at me when I looked up. I couldn’t help reading accusation in their expressions.

‘What was that about?’ said Declan.

‘How should I know? I haven’t seen anything like it before.’

‘It seems to know you,’ said Dan. I glanced down at the thing in my hand. Now a green light was flashing. I looked for an on-off switch without success. The exterior of the black thing was quite smooth, like a sea-washed pebble. I experimented with turning it in various directions.

‘I can be with you in ten,’ said the voice of Tanya Fairfax suddenly.

I jumped. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘Everything’s fine. We just had an accident with the – thing. The communication device.’

‘An accident,’ she commented. ‘That’s what they always say.’

‘Give it to me,’ hissed Declan. ‘I’ll drive over it in the jeep.’

‘I wouldn’t advise it, Mr O’Donovan. It’s programmed to destroy itself and everything within a certain radius if damaged.’

‘How big a radius?’ said Declan.

The device remained silent.

‘Don’t push your luck,’ I told him.

‘Let’s throw it in the reservoir,’ said Fiona.

‘Are you mad?’ Declan turned on her. ‘It’s probably full of some deadly but untraceable poison that would spoil our drinking water supply for decades to come.’

‘Just an idea,’ muttered Fiona.

‘We could throw it off a cliff,’ Dan suggested.

‘We still don’t know how big a radius of destruction it has,’ I pointed out. ‘I’d better just hang on to it for now.’

There was an awkward silence.

‘I think I’d better take it,’ said Declan after a moment. ‘You seem to be able to activate it – you’d have her and all her minions descending on us again in no time.’

‘I’ll be careful,’ I said. In fact what had just happened had made me seriously consider contacting the woman, if only to establish just what she was offering. Declan and Fiona obviously wouldn’t ever trust me, no matter how much I did to help them, and I wasn’t entirely sure about Dan either, which was even more dispiriting.

‘Just make sure you are,’ said Declan.

I didn’t have to be careful for very long. That night the little black communications device disappeared. I had left it in my jacket pocket when I went to bed. I had got into the way of wearing most of my clothes in bed, as a substitute for bedding, but I couldn’t sleep in my jacket, as I found it constricting. So the jacket was carelessly strewn across the old chair we had found somewhere and attempted to mend – not very successfully. There was a constant danger of being tipped into the fire if you leaned forward on it the wrong way.

I was slightly annoyed at the time, and of course I blamed Declan, the obvious suspect, but we were too dependent on each other to be cross for very long. At least, that was how I felt. As time went on I became less and less sure of how the others felt about it.

A few days went by. We had tried at first to keep track of the days of the week and so on, but had become lazy after a while. Like farmers we would soon only be aware of the changing seasons, the direction of the wind and the colour of the sunset, I mused one afternoon while I was working through some ephemera in the old stables. Things arrived randomly in haphazardly organised boxes, so that somebody’s holiday postcard collection sat on top of a collection of letters from the Scottish Government Revenue and Customs Service, an organisation which presumably didn’t exist any more, or at least not above the water-line. That thought should have cheered me up a bit, but I had a vaguely discontented feeling about me that day.

When I paused in the middle of reading a postcard from Dubrovnik which claimed that the sender was painting the town pink – I puzzled for a moment over the significance of it – I analysed my discontent and found it was mostly to do with the disappearance of the black thing.

What if I really had wanted help from Ms Fairfax and her mysterious company? Why should Declan decide something like that on behalf of all of us? Everybody here could benefit from more food, and better shelter. An army camp-bed and rations might after all be quite luxurious compared to our current facilities.

I decided to look for the device among his things. At least then I would have the choice.

It was easier than I thought. Fiona and Declan were both on a raiding party – or at least that was how I thought of what they were doing – down in Edinburgh. They were gradually liberating food supplies from a shop that had previously called itself the Last Tesco’s in Scotland. I used to worry that any remaining food would have been contaminated in some way by water or something, but they were very careful, and the Last Tesco’s was in one of the higher-up out of the way streets that led up towards Bonaly Tower. I suspected hardly anybody had ever gone in there even before the storm.

It wasn’t all that far away, so they might be back soon, though I knew Declan had refused to take the jeep down because we were running low on fuel for it. It must actually have been about the last vehicle in Scotland still to be powered by fossil fuel. We had found a farmer’s secret underground supply of diesel, but that would run out some time soon and then if the jeep couldn’t be converted to run on some healthier form of power it would have to be dismantled for the parts. I had my eye on the back seat from it for our little home.

I entered Declan and Fiona’s hut with some trepidation in case of amateurish booby-traps, but I made it to the corner where the bed was without being doused in flour, water or anything worse. Just as well Declan didn’t believe in wasting resources.

If I hadn’t been careless enough to leave it in my pocket I thought I would probably have kept the device under my pillow, or the folded sweatshirt that passed for a pillow these days, but there was no sign of it under the spare jumper at the head of the bed. I glanced round for a box or a chest that he might keep valuables in.

And there was the device itself, sitting in plain view on top of the shelves he and Fiona had made from bricks and planks to house books and crockery and so on. I hastily grabbed at it and shoved it in my pocket.

It gave a sort of bleep but that was all.

Back in the stables, I ate a cheese sandwich capsule. It was only marginally less disgusting than the cheese and gherkin sandwich I had once inadvertently bought at a train station somewhere in Europe. In many ways I looked back with nostalgia on the times when we were still able to travel, but in others it was more a case of looking back in anger, or at least mild irritation.

If you bit the capsule in half it took a little longer to eat, giving the illusion of being actual food. I was raising the second half towards my mouth when the little black communication device said,

‘Mr Hepburn! I’m so glad you decided to get in touch.’

Bad words flowed into my head and it was a struggle not to voice any of them. I waited.

‘You did decide, didn’t you?’ continued Ms Fairfax. ‘You didn’t activate it by accident again?’

‘Not exactly,’ I muttered, throwing the second half of the cheese sandwich capsule to the ground.

‘Because I’ve organized some assistance for you, and it should be arriving in about ten minutes.’

‘No, they can’t! I mean – I just wanted to talk things through with you a bit more – see what sort of assistance you had in mind. That sort of thing.’

I could envisage a platoon – or whatever the military term was – of soldiers being airlifted into our cosy little camp. Dan would probably take up arms against them and be taken prisoner again, or worse, while Declan and Fiona would head for the Highlands without further discussion. I closed my eyes to try and clear my brain. It didn’t work. Her voice broke into my thoughts.

‘Oh, dear,’ she said, not sounding apologetic. ‘I hope this won’t cause any friction between you and your friends.’

‘It isn’t a case of friction,’ I said irritably. ‘I could handle that – it’s nothing new. We just needed more time to work out what to do with more man-power, that’s all.’

‘And woman-power,’ she said. ‘I’ll be accompanying the troops.’

‘Ah.’ She’d be leading them into battle. That figured. She was a dead ringer for Boadicea, now I came to think of it.

It was the kind of thing Emma would have enjoyed, although I wasn’t sure how she would feel about another woman usurping her role, so to speak.

‘I’ll deal with the friction,’ she said. ‘I have my methods.’

It was slightly unfortunate that Declan and the others came back early from their foraging expedition.

‘Bloody neighbourhood wardens,’ he complained, throwing down a couple of boxes. Fiona silently added another to the pile.

‘Where’s Dan?’ I enquired. I had to keep a close watch on him if the soldiers were on their way.

‘Helping Mrs Swan. Here they are now.’

Mrs Swan was a woman, probably in late middle age – or not much older than me, in other words –  who liked to think of herself as indestructible because she had survived the great storm when some of her friends and neighbours hadn’t. She always tried to carry more than she could manage and had to be helped by somebody else in the group. Declan had given the others supposedly secret instructions that if she fell and seriously injured herself because of overdoing things, they had to leave her behind to take her chances. It seemed harsh to me, but luckily it wasn’t my responsibility to supervise raiding parties.

On this occasion she was limping a bit as she and Dan came along. Lucky for her that Declan hadn’t just dumped her at the side of the road.

‘I’m sorry to hold you all up,’ she was saying. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t come along with you the next time. Is there anything I could do to help you, Mr Hepburn?’

She could start by calling me Gavin as almost everybody else did. I don’t know how this ridiculous formality came about, but I suspected she might have been at one of my lectures on Old Town archaeology at one time. She seemed like the kind of person who would like being seen at that kind of cultural event.

Dan put her smaller box with the others and took off his back-pack to unload it.

‘What happened with the neighbourhood wardens?’ I enquired. Better to distract myself with random chat than to have to break the news to Declan.

‘Oh, they were being officious again,’ said Declan dismissively. ‘Trying to tell us where we could and couldn’t go. According to them, the last Tesco’s is out of bounds except to people still living in Colinton… Like there are many of those. Everybody with any sense has moved up here or gone to stay with family up north.’

‘That’s a nuisance,’ I said absently, scanning the sky for helicopters.

‘’Hey mate,’ said Declan. ‘Is there something you want to tell us?’

‘Um,’ I said. I handed him the black device. ‘I accidentally set this off and now Ms Fairfax is bringing reinforcements.’

I felt like a schoolboy who’d been clyping to the teachers as three pairs of eyes stared at me with expressions ranging from disapproval to – well, stronger disapproval.

‘That’s nice,’ said Mrs Swan. ‘We could do with a few more bodies around here. Some of us aren’t getting any younger, you know.’

Staring back at Declan, I had the feeling one of the bodies was going to be mine. But it was too late to do anything about it now.

‘So you happened to come across the thing – where, exactly?’ said Declan.

‘In your hut,’ I mumbled. ‘Sorry – I just thought I should keep a hold of it myself. It was my responsibility.’

‘It was your responsibility not to bring hordes of soldiers down on our heads,’ said Declan. He turned on his heel. ‘Fiona!’

They walked off together towards the hut they had called home for the past month or two. I wondered what they would do. Fetching a weapon was one strong possibility. Packing to leave was another. It was beyond my psychic powers to predict which it would be, although I firmly hoped there wouldn’t be a weapon involved. Ms Fairfax and her troops must have better weapons at their disposal than we had. She seemed like a woman who had the most advanced defence equipment that money could buy or that theft and guile could obtain elsewhere and smuggle across the border. I didn’t want Dan to get caught in the middle. Well, to be perfectly honest I didn’t want to get caught in the middle either. Emma would kill me, apart from anything else.

Once again I wished she was the one getting out of the helicopter that had just landed not very far away instead of Ms Fairfax. Maybe if I closed my eyes and wished…