Horseflesh Read online

the way first, figure out the scale and scope of what we’re dealing with but he just goes on and on. That was just before the weekend Mum went off on her ‘here comes the apocalypse’ phone call. You can see why I wasn’t in the mood, right?

  11.

  My mouth is very dry.

  They used to say the internet was the window on the world. Trouble with windows is they just emphasise that you’re on the outside, looking in.

  The following week it started getting really weird. We had the DNA patterns up on an interactive screen – all very high-tech down in our basement – and we were studying what we had. Well me and Brinkley were – Oates had found something or other on You Tube. Something he’d probably have been sacked for at any normal office.

  “There’s four groups,” said Brinkley. It sticks in my mind because of the later significance of ‘four’ but at the time I just thought ‘oh yeah’, like the interesting stuff was still waiting to happen.

  “Four breeds – any ideas what?”

  “Got a list of the most popular horsemeat sources here – just putting them up…now,” another set of bars appeared overlaying the test results. You’ve seen DNA diagrams – a vertical stack of small horizontal bars with assorted gaps. Looks a bit like when you de-frag your hard-drive. Anyway, problem number one:

  “They don’t match.” That was obvious but it needed saying – they didn’t. Our samples – and I mean none of them – was anywhere close to a match to the ‘normal’ sources.

  “Eh?” Oates looked up from his screen, Mars-bar sticking out of his mouth obscenely.

  “They must have some new breed out in Romania they’ve started using.”

  “Okay but it must be related to an existing breed, Brinks,” I said, “Show us some more breeds – can’t be difficult to narrow it down.”

  “There’s quite a few,” said Brinkley in his dull monotone. “Best let Monica chew through them by herself for a bit.” Monica was Brinkley’s pet name for the software he’d written to analyse DNA for comparisons. We called it Mrs Brinkley, so enamoured with it was he. I’m smiling writing this down – happy days. We don’t half take stuff for granted.

  So what did Monica find?

  “Gentlemen, I suggest you sit down for this,” announced Brinkley, grandly. But he had a habit of announcing things grandly so frankly at first we didn’t bother. It was the following morning –Thursday, I think. Oates and me had had a late-night session in the Parrot and Starfish the night before. We were tired, bored and still slightly hungover.

  “Just tell us, Brinks.”

  “No, I mean it – sit down.” Now this sounded unusually forceful and Oates looked at me and I looked at Oakes and he raised his eyebrows in a ‘what do you think’ kind of way and I tipped my head as if to say ‘let’s give it a go’ and so did as he asked.

  “Okay so first we thank Monica for cleverly coming up with three things we didn’t know before.” Silence. “Guys – you know the rules, thank Monica for all the work she’s just saved us.”

  I think we may have mumbled a response. I usually mumbled something rude.

  “Okay. So firstly our samples – or at least those we’ve analysed so far – are none of the usual breeds.”

  “We knew that.”

  “No, we suspected that. Now we know it.” Oates and me did that ‘exchanged glances’ thing you read in books. “Second – we have no match for the breed against any breed of horse on the database…”

  “Great – another duff piece of data…” said Oates.

  “Far from it – this is a unique database – it is every single horse breed ever discovered.”

  “Sorry – but are you saying we’ve just discovered a new breed of horse?”

  “Well we haven’t – someone out in Romania has,” I replied. “And they’re chopping them up and eating them.”

  Brinkley frowned.

  “What do we think – is that likely?”

  “That someone has actually bred a type of horse specifically to eat? Possibly – we pretty much did that with cows and pigs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”

  “But it’s not just that – this breed is so utterly different from anything currently on the records. If you purpose bred them they’d resemble whatever they were based on – no matter how different they looked. You know how it works.”

  “The more we study the more I think we don’t. Anything else we should know?”

  “Well hold your horses… Horses, yes?” Brinkley had a habit of waiting for people to laugh at his jokes, which of course had the opposite effect. “We have plenty more to study – we could possibly just have one batch here.”

  “Eighty-three per-cent chance you’re wrong,” said Oates. I forgot to mention he was our numbers man. And a bloody good one, despite the dubious browsing habits. “Extremely unlikely.”

  “Still – we have more to do.”

  “Three – you said Monica had found out three things.”

  “Oh yes – whatever breed or breeds they are, and maybe this isn’t such a surprise, they are extremely interbred. The DNA within each group is almost identical.”

  Almost.

  12.

  We agreed to carry on testing and didn’t mention what we’d found to Craddock – he was only interested in diseases after all. In the meantime the net widened: we were testing kebabs and dripping and just about everything. Only a fraction hit the papers and the requests for updates were increasing. As were those from Mum.

  “What’s going on, Craig? You must know about this horsemeat business.”

  “Well…” I started, but she continued anyway.

  “Mrs Rogers agrees it’s a sign. First the Pope, then this, and the meteor. And that nice man with the funny legs shooting his girlfriend. Well…” Two hours of it every Saturday without fail. She was determined. I wasn’t sure how the meteor was connected but in her head these things went together like apple-pie and custard.

  Next day was Friday. I was meant to go over to Bristol to visit Lianne but of course I never got. Just before the Friday afternoon briefing we got more results back, and frankly they stunned us into telling Craddock.

  “So no diseases yet?” he asked in now customary fashion.

  “No diseases,” I replied.

  “Yet,” added Brinkley, helpfully. He really could be a twonk.

  “Right – well what about origin, what can you tell me?”

  Oates ran his hand through his hair and looked at me. I shrugged back: weird or not it was time he knew.

  “Right – well it’s like this. We narrowed it down to four breeds of horse – or at least we thought they were breeds.”

  “Which ones?”

  “Well that’s the odd thing – they aren’t on the database,” said Oates. He liked being the spokesman.

  “Shit – you mean we’ve bought crap data again?”

  “No no, you don’t understand: they are no known breed. They’re new, unique.”

  “A new breed of horse? Seriously?” said Craddock, looking from one to the other.

  “We-eeell yes and no. You see it’s not as simple as that.”

  “Simple? Look – just get to the point, I need to report to Whitehall by four…”

  “There’s four kinds of horse. Four very distinct kinds of horse. None of which are any horse we or anyone else has seen before,” said Oates, warming to the task of doom-monger. “Except possibly the Romanians,” he added.

  “And?”

  “And the punchline is – we just re-analysed their DNA and we found a calibration error. We knew we had a narrow pool with abnormally similar DNA which we put down to excessive interbreeding…”

  “Oh great, first mad cows, now mad horses! That’s all we need!”

  “Horse.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Not mad horses – mad horse, Mr Craddock. We’ve analysed meat taken from across the EU, huge volumes. Some products are sixty, seventy even a hundred per-cent horse. We are talking massive quantities
here. But the recalibrated results show that the DNA isn’t just very similar, it’s absolutely identical. Each group isn’t a breed – it’s one, single solitary horse.”

  13.

  I may have made some of that up for dramatic effect, but I don’t think so. But then I’ve imagined other stuff recently, so hell, what do I know? I used to know so much: that the world was basically big and boring, that change took a long time to happen – climate change, continental drift. Social equality. But then this…

  I checked the traps again: nothing. Nothing on the e-mail either. There look to be people out there – well there would be, not everyone was affected. But can I trust them? Man in my position can’t afford to. Even if I meet someone who’s infected I still have a three in four chance of being okay: but what if I meet the fourth type? What then? I know what then – I saw the pictures. So many horrible pictures.

  14.

  So we did what any normal, reasonable human beings would do when struck with the inexplicable – we went down the pub. It seems amazing to me now that we spent that night like any other. The Parrot and Starfish was rocking, and the horsemeat jokes were rife. Did you know that Hamburgers is an anagram of Shergar Bum? Loved that. Anyway, we got to talking, theorising – me and Oates this is by the way, Brinkley was off somewhere, being ill as it turned out. Poor bloke.

  Just four horses. That fact kept rattling round inside my head all night. We won on the quiz machine for the first time ever! Fifty quid. Again – the things that seemed important. The link is that I Googled something when I got home - checked an answer, can’t remember what. Must have been one or two