The Unhappy Medium, page 6
As they had successfully done countless times before, the McCauley Brothers began a battle for control of the site using every corrupt ruse in their considerable arsenal.
The charities did their charitable best. Public opinion was firmly on their side and there were even questions in parliament, but behind the scenes, the funny handshakes and backhanders worked their unjust magic. So the inevitable day finally came when the McCauleys took possession.
On the bleak heath, security guards had arrived long before dawn, their yellow high-visibility jackets and hard hats defining a protective phalanx for the advancing diggers. Protestors, their faces wild with indignation, screamed hoarsely through their loudhailers at the show of force deploying towards them across the historic battlefield. Old gentlemen threw themselves pointlessly in front of bulldozers. With the local TV crew filming, scuffles ebbed and flowed for many hours. But by midday it was clear to all that the developers, equipped as they were with considerable hired muscle, could not be deflected from carrying out their planned desecration of the site. The protestors were kept at arm’s length from the gathering workmen as they erected a screen around the full extent of the battlefield, the stony-faced security men returning the demoralised insults from the protestors with practised indifference.
Around 4pm a convoy of vehicles drove onto the site led by the shiny black Land Rover Discovery of Ascot McCauley, spokesman for the McCauley family, provoking the TV crew to rush through the security cordon in anticipation of a statement. As the vehicle pulled to a halt, the passenger door opened revealing Ascot McCauley himself, his spindly Savile-Row-besuited body topped by an affected twirl of foppish dark hair. His sharp cynical features quickly dropped the sneer of victory as the camera caught him; seamlessly, he replaced it with a priest-like countenance. He surveyed the ragged line of protestors and paused briefly before placing his wellington boots upon the sticky soil. With that a wave of protest erupted from the gathered crowd.
‘Shame on you! Shame on you!’ they chanted aggressively. An empty bottle of Welsh spring water sailed close overhead.
‘Mr McCauley,’ asked the young female reporter, ‘can you give us a statement?’ The developer looked back to the Range Rover and winked knowingly to his siblings, intently following the proceedings from behind the tinted windows.
‘Of course young lady,’ he replied, his sharp face oozing sincerity and dark charm. ‘McCauley Developments have nothing to hide.’
‘Well,’ continued the insistent reporter, ‘what have you to say to the hundreds of people here today who have come to try and prevent your development of this sensitive site?’ Ascot closed his eyes briefly and folded his hands together, the forefingers extended to his lips to imply pensive deliberation.
‘Well firstly,’ he began, deploying a holier-than-thou manner with well-rehearsed panache. ‘I would like to reassure everyone here today, and all your many viewers at home, that with this development, as with every other domestic, industrial and leisure initiative undertaken by McCauley Developments, every possible effort has been made to approach the sometimes opposing issues of a growing housing shortage, the pressure on the environment and the respect of this country’s wonderful heritage with great sensitivity.’
‘Bollocks!’ announced a loudhailer.
‘Great sensitivity,’ repeated Ascot McCauley, smiling through his perfectly white but oddly small and uniform teeth. ‘And this development will be no different. We shall be ensuring that, in order to serve the needs of the wider public and save the environment and history of England for future generations, we will be employing every means at our disposal in the pursuit of a harmonious balance. Indeed, this is why we have engaged a team of professional archaeologists to be present at every stage of this exciting project, ensuring that a proper scientific record of this unique site ...’
‘Leave the dead in peace!’ bellowed the protestor’s loudhailer again before it was rendered mute with pepper spray.
‘Please, please ...’ continued Ascot, waving away the accusations with his dangly hands, his pink shirt and cufflinks popping out from under the pinstripe. ‘Rest assured that we will be paying the utmost respect to any human remains we may happen to discover during the course of development.’ He gestured back towards a minibus and beckoned its occupants to come out for the cameras. ‘Why, here is our team of archaeologists now,’ he declared to the camera, and with that a dozen unusually beefy men sidled awkwardly out into the weak light. Superficially they resembled archaeologists but the bushy beards were in most cases probably false. While the exaggerated shorts, checked shirts and caterpillar boots lent a certain Time Team air to the gathering, the cauliflower ears, broken noses and violence-themed tattoos hinted at a different specialism altogether.
‘Are you sure these men are archaeologists?’ asked the reporter, watching the men gesturing obscenely towards the protestors from behind the cordon of luminous yellow.
‘Certainly, these men are the finest in this field,’ replied Ascot. ‘You can rest assured that they will see to it that the dead of Juggin’s Lump shall find a new and peaceful place of burial and dignity, entirely at the expense of McCauley Developments.’ Ascot looked reverently up to the clouds in religious affectation. As he let the words hang, there was a last murmur of abuse from the demoralised protestors. ‘Now please, if you will excuse me, we will need to begin our sensitive work immediately.’
‘But Mr McCauley,’ pushed the reporter, to no avail, and Ascot McCauley walked briskly away signalling to his team. ‘Surely ...’ But the words were lost in the din of a huge bulldozer as it started its engine and lumbered relentlessly towards its desecrating duties behind the now-complete screens.
The protestors, knowing beyond any doubt that the second battle of Juggin’s Lump was at an end, began slowly to drift off into the early evening. They trudged sadly away as the large arc lights surrounding the site began to crackle, one by one, into life. The diggers and faux archaeologists were left to their dubious devices.
Hidden behind the screens, the excavators began without ceremony to scoop the damp and fetid soil from the ground, their mechanical shovels heaving the rags and bones from the ground and dropping them with zero dignity into dump trucks. The depressing little bundles of cloth and leather, many still holding pathetic weapons in their skeletal grips, tumbled worthless into the lorries, mixing messily together when they had once been intact within the preserving bog.
The powerful machines took no time to complete their sacrilegious work. Night had only just fallen by the time the last bodies had been dragged from their resting place and dropped like mere root vegetables into the trucks. Ascot McCauley sipped from his hip flask as he watched the proceedings and wiped the moisture from his lips with his pink, initialled handkerchief. Smiling with satisfaction at yet another dirty rotten job done, he turned and stuck up a spindly thumb of triumphalism to his brothers, still behind the Land Rover’s darkened glass.
‘OK,’ he shouted to the foreman as the last of the lorries pulled away into the darkness carrying their sad cargoes, ‘you can tell them all to go home now, nice work.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of notes held together with a rubber band. ‘Here you go, there’s an extra four hundred in there – make sure they keep their mouths shut.’
CHAPTER 5 – Needs mus t
After months of bad atmospheres, stress and arguments, Newton was delighted by his wife’s response to the news. The move to Cambridge presented no obvious friction, and she even leapt slightly off the ground when she saw the size of the temporary house that Havotech had made available. The rapidly growing Gabriella was immediately at home in the extensive and verdant garden.
They’d felt confident enough of their new circumstances to become a two-car family. Rowena chose a sleek dark Audi and Newton, indulging a lifetime weakness for the classics, splashed out on a 1972 Citroën DS. The DS was by anyone’s standards an impressive car. True, it wasn’t fast and had to be treated like a sensitive elderly relative, but its shark-like lines and technical eccentricities meant that Newton often found himself talking to interested blokes whenever he pulled over. He delighted in demonstrating the headlamps that followed the turn of the steering and the wonderfully eccentric hydromatic suspension that lifted the old car up off the ground as if it was hovering.
Rowena threw herself immediately into the Cambridge scene while Newton busied himself with the impressive new laboratory. Peter Carnatt was pleasantly attentive as Newton made requests for new equipment, encouraging him that anything would be considered and usually procured. Soon the old rig back in London seemed pitifully quaint and inadequate.
It took Newton’s team some five months to assemble, test and calibrate the experiment before they could finally start to harvest scientific data. To celebrate the occasion, Carnatt and the management assembled awkwardly and expressionless in lab coats and goggles as Newton talked them through the apparatus, conscious of the odd way in which they blankly listened devoid of any real warmth or interest. Between them, Peter Carnatt floated almost as an interpreter, switching chameleon-like between the vernacular of business and the lab floor. There was a pronounced gulf between the two worlds. The CEO and his top team had their own entrance to the building with its own hedge-shielded car parking and they could usually only be seen distantly through the walls of glass from which the entire complex had been built. On one occasion, Newton found himself in a corridor near what may or may not have been a board meeting. Through the glass, Peter Carnatt caught his eyes and then turned, activating the blinds to deny Newton his line of sight. Not that there had been anything to see – just energy figures and graphs. Clearly, the distance between the lab and the company executives was there for a reason and it was there to stay.
Mingling with visiting scientists from some of Havotech’s other projects, Newton also found that much of the usual cross-pollination he had enjoyed in his academic environment was curiously lacking. Many seemed positively loathed to divulge any sense of progress or detail, and after a while, Newton stopped even asking. He was also slightly put out after a year in the lab to find himself and his team slapped with a raft of non-disclosure agreements, effectively cutting them off from the wider scientific establishment. They seethed and cursed for days, turning the laboratory air blue as they waved the documents around with contempt. This placed Newton in uncomfortable and unfamiliar territory, and his inability to defend his team in this new atmosphere began to nag and unsettle him.
At least Havotech was understanding about his television and publishing work. During his second year in Cambridge, the BBC approached him to write and present a series of six programmes exploring the history and application of scientific thought. Newton threw himself wholeheartedly into the project, seeing it as a prime opportunity to make the case for scientific rationality in the face of growing superstition and mysticism, a trend that troubled and irritated him on a daily basis. Newton’s series was predictably measured and well considered, but it did not hold back its punches. The paranormal, religion and the full menu of irrational thought came in for the Barlow treatment in a series that ranged far and wide both in its scope and in air miles. Filming took Newton all around the world and though he was gone from the lab for several months, his paymasters at Havotech seemed pleased with the reflected kudos that Newton brought to their profile.
The series did very well, pulling in surprisingly high viewing figures from a British population driven half mad by two decades of reality television. Part of this no doubt came from Newton’s effective on- screen persona, a cool, smart young man as opposed to the tired old cliché of the nutty professor; soon he became used to being recognised as he walked the streets. He even had the embarrassing yet flattering accolade of being voted one of the top ten sexy men in Britain by one of the very same glossy magazines that Rowena seemed to be reading every time he saw her. This won Newton a much-improved domestic environment but he found himself the constant centre of attention at Rowena’s less-than-comfortable supper parties, introduced to endless fawning couples like some kind of performing sea lion.
But now he seemed to start attracting criticism as well. First came a muttering from the scientific community, white-coat academics less than comfortable with his dapper on-screen image. His TV work was consistently belittled in some learned circles, but Newton, on the crest of a wave, refused to be fazed. In a world that seemed hobbled and traumatised by superstition, Newton felt he was duty-bound to promote the alternative logical message. This he did with tactics that some were beginning to consider overkill. His big TV series ended with a barely disguised attack on religion and superstition, Newton declaring that: ‘Belief, a notion that is advertised as bringing comfort and calm, instead brings uncertainty, conflict and mistrust. Our inability to move forward from this construct into an era of logic, where we can face reality and our own future with objectivity, lies at the centre of all mankind’s great dilemmas. If we continue to abdicate responsibility for our actions to a higher being, then in the chaos and fear that follows, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.’ Citing suicide bombers, the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch trials, Newton made his case firmly. Needless to say, it created something of a fuss in the papers the following day with one critic describing Newton’s attitude as arrogance of the highest order.
‘Barlow’s dogmatic atheism is nothing new, of course. It is driven by smugness and a desire to look down at people far more than it’s driven by any desire to uncover truths.’
Looking for some good old-fashioned on-screen bloodshed, programme controllers soon had Newton debating with disgruntled theologians in a series of TV debates. Angry and on the defensive after Newton’s prime-time atheism, there were several heated encounters with Newton holding the line coolly against sustained counter attacks from various faith groups. Not being in the least faint-hearted, Newton waded in with relish, giving both his fans and detractors a treasury of sound-bites that could rally or enrage depending on your orientation.
‘Dr Barlow has clearly forgotten the difference between debate and bullying,’ said the London Standard following a lively slugfest in which Newton had told an archbishop that Jesus Christ, should he happen against the odds to return to the earth, would in all likelihood hang out with the atheists. As if this wasn’t enough, he crowned the evening by stating that ‘common sense is just God’s way of telling us he doesn’t exist’.
‘Let this be the last time this odious cynic is allowed to parade his ill-judged conceit on prime-time television,’ said the Sunday Express after Newton declared that the notion of God hampered human development.
And it wasn’t just religion that came in for the Barlow treatment. Even as he was swatting away the devout, Newton was invited to participate in a series of somewhat lighter programmes designed to test a number of paranormal phenomena and self-declared ‘gifted’ individuals.
It was an offer Newton couldn’t refuse. He had always loathed the irrational, superstitious and fraudulent. UFOs, ghosts, clairvoyance and alternative medicine – as far as Newton was concerned, each one of them constituted something beyond mere harmless fun or an over-active imagination. Weren’t the natural wonders of the real world stunning enough? Most of all he was horrified at how far pragmatism had diverged from public life and influence, society seemingly drowning under the weight of religion, bigotry and political dogma.
Although Newton was generally careful to avoid playing the evangelistic role too hard, on this occasion, he entered into the spirit of the programmes with gusto, spending most of each episode fighting an irresistible smirk in the presence of self-proclaimed ghost hunters, diviners, conduits to the cosmos and spoon benders. Some episodes of Ghost Show were hilariously silly, and Newton’s wit and dryly delivered analytical cynicism soon became an unmissable weekly treat for the scientifically minded viewer. Faced with the seemingly limitless public appetite for the spooky, Newton felt he was doing his small part to keep the charlatans at bay, but inevitably, it led to yet another wave of criticism, this time from the mediums, the believers and the superstitious themselves. Their attacks ranged from ill-prepared attempts at pseudoscience to charges of Newton being a general killjoy. But he calmly pointed out that ‘contacting’ the dead on behalf of the lonely and bereaved, or claiming to rid houses of the tortured souls of murder victims, could hardly be described as ‘just a bit of harmless fun’.
Soon he was the focus of a pro-paranormal backlash as an army of mediums and ghost busters, licking their wounds from yet another Barlow tongue lashing, fought for an opportunity to silence Newton’s cool and dismissive message. His blood up, Newton was drawing a line in the sand, a bulkhead against a growing tide of mysticism and mumbo jumbo.
It irked him somewhat that other scientists tried to put him off his sceptical activities, warning him that even slight contact with the ‘crazies’ might rub off on him – as if you could somehow catch superstition like an unpleasant skin infection. Undeterred, Newton continued his campaigning media presence with gusto, merrily unmasking the odd fraudulent séance here and debunking a miracle there. With his face now familiar and frankly over-exposed on both sides of the rational divide, clouds that Newton chose to ignore were gathering.
Dr Barlow was starting to accumulate his enemies.
CHAPTER 6 – Ido l
Islington residents Juliet and Piers Layhard had been preparing their dinner party since 5pm. Piers had come home early from his architectural practice by way of the posh gastromarket on Liverpool Street, where he’d parked the vintage Saab and grabbed the wine and cheese. Juliet was something of a perfectionist – she’d be the first to admit it – and had been agitatedly marinating the prime Angus beef since the morning, fretting and huffing, cursing the kitchen they currently had neither the time nor the designer to upgrade.
