The Dark Horizon, page 18
The route would cut through classical hills and aged woodland only a mile or so from the school. The plod of the planning process was negotiated and building work began just a week after Esther turned eighteen. Protesters converged, peace camps were set up and the newly found adult decided to mark her majority by joining the demonstration. Mollie, a couple of months older, followed.
Protesters laid in the way of bulldozers and chained their bodies to trees. There were scuffles with the police, abuse hurled at contractors, chases though the woods, and all in the sunshine of the English springtime.
On the scale of these things, it was a minor battle with an inevitable outcome. A week of skirmishes passed, the demonstration waned and the road was built. But it was there, another anonymous interviewee told them, that Esther developed her taste for protest; the theme which would come to define her life.
‘She was hyper about it, absolutely buzzing,’ the woman said. ‘She asked everyone what demos they’d been on, for tips about how to stop the bulldozers, where the next protest was. She just couldn’t get enough.’
Brighton was their next destination. It wasn’t such a difficult journey, in part due to the failure of Esther’s efforts.
Perhaps it was the similarity to her first protest that drew the young woman to the edge of the South Downs, where another new road was planned.
Summertime was all around, the fields a pallet of wild flowers, the distant sea coloured that sparkling blue it boasts only in the happiest of seasons. On a hilltop, beside the remains of a small wood, Dan and Nigel found a ramshackle camp. Where once its views were of unspoiled hills, now it was within a few hundred metres of an incessantly roaring road.
A couple of banners were strung between the trees, sadly forlorn in their messages. “Done, but not forgotten” one read, “Look what you’ve lost”, the other. But if the drivers who passed took any heed of the plea there was no sign. The traffic rushed ever onwards.
The natives were friendly enough, five of them, staying for the summer. No longer to try to stop the development, but instead to goad a few consciences.
‘We reckon you press people did us proud here,’ a thirty-something, shaven headed man who called himself Jimbob told them. ‘You’re welcome to share a cup of tea with us.’ And that, despite Dan’s askance look at the battered mug, they did.
The group remembered Esther and Mollie. The pair were still close, inseparable the word that was again used. ‘Esther was the boss, though,’ Jimbob said. ‘She was like an older sister to Mollie.’
The demonstrators had heard about the protests in Plymouth and of Esther becoming a fugitive. ‘Not much we can tell you,’ Jimbob said, apologetically. ‘Secrecy of the sect and all that.’
‘I understand,’ Dan replied. ‘But if I don’t get to hear a little about her…’
‘What?’
‘Oh, nothing.’
‘Go on – what?’
‘Look, I don’t want it to feel like I’m putting pressure on you,’ said the man who did, ‘It’s just without a story about Esther, all I’ll be broadcasting is an item on the developers at Resurgam. It’ll be like an advert for them.’
The group looked to each other. There were a couple of shrugs.
‘Well, if you can’t help,’ Dan said, turning away with no intention of leaving.
‘Suppose it can’t do any harm if we just tell you a bit,’ Jimbob said. ‘Tessie knew her best, didn’t you?’
‘Pretty well,’ an older woman with long hair and a leather jacket replied. ‘She was a good tunneller, really got stuck in. Nice kid too. Said she felt at home with us, always chatting and smiling. Until the pigs moved in.’
The camp was well-established, a hundred or so protesters. One day, just before dawn contractors came to begin the building work. They were escorted by police in full riot gear, creeping through the fields and woods. The great machines which would strip, chop and cut anything nature had the cheek to place in their way were poised and ready to follow.
‘We was infiltrated,’ Jimbob said bitterly. ‘They picked the morning after a little party we had. They knew. They was on us before we had a chance.’
None of the protesters made it to the subterranean fortress. A handful managed to chain themselves to trees, but that was it. Esther was young and quick and had almost reached an old oak when a policeman grabbed her.
‘She tried to fight him off,’ Tessie said, proudly. ‘Put up a hell of a show, she did. But some other cops got her too and that was it.’
‘She really fought them hard?’ Dan asked.
‘Like a demon. Gave one of the cops a lovely black eye. Got some fire in her belly when she needs it, that one. I wouldn’t wanna cross her.’
That afternoon, in a very passable hotel near to Brighton’s marathon promenade, Dan made a series of phone calls. In the London campaign against bankers’ bonuses there was no official record of Esther.
The protesters were well-prepared. They wore hoodies, scarves, shades and baseball caps for disguise and few were arrested. A call to Dan’s best source of information, petulantly though he received the request, revealed that Esther was suspected of involvement.
A small gang had split from the main body of demonstrators, dodged through a maze of side streets and made it to the stone-clad headquarters of one of the capitalists-in-chief. They daubed the edifice with a new style of paintwork of which Jackson Pollock would have been proud.
A couple of witnesses spoke of a noticeably young woman leading the gang. Her hoodie had come off in a struggle with a security guard and the description was suggestive of Esther.
CCTV footage agreed, although with a distant, indistinct image. It also showed the gang repeatedly turning to the woman for instructions. The final pictures were of her blowing a whistle and the group dispersing instantly, all heading in different directions. They were followed by a squad of police officers, who the CCTV showed suddenly tripping and sprawling to the ground for no apparent reason.
‘Fishing line,’ Adam explained. ‘The clever little anarchists had strung a load between some pillars.’
There was a quirk to this demonstration, another suspicion without proof. The protesters seemed to know precisely what security would be in place at the bank and how to circumvent it.
‘I can’t tell you why with any certainty,’ Adam said. ‘But an internal investigation at the bank resulted in a security guard being quietly dismissed. He was suspected of having a relationship with a protester who used him to get inside information.’
‘Esther?’
‘As I said, there’s no proof. But work it out for yourself.’
A hunt for Esther was launched, but soon abandoned. The problem, Adam said, was the evidence was too uncertain to make for any charges. Besides, there was a practical issue. Esther had no known address and there was no way of tracing her.
‘Interesting,’ Dan mused. ‘She’s learning. And she’s growing more confident, or cunning – or maybe both.’
With Lizzie for an editor, the idea of a blank cheque could be discarded to the extremes of fantasy. Dan’s suggestion of an extra week on the road, to visit Inverness, Newcastle and Coventry, places which also bore suggestions of Esther’s work, was summarily vetoed.
‘One week, no longer, bring me a brilliant report,’ was the reply.
So next they headed for Swansea. In truth, a week away was sufficient for both, homely sorts that they were.
‘I miss James and Andrew,’ Nigel said one evening, over a beer.
‘I miss Rutherford,’ Dan added.
‘And Claire?’
‘That goes without saying,’ agreed the man who hadn’t said.
Swansea’s attraction to the protesting tendency was a new marina. It would, conservationists claimed, cause all manner of irreparable damage to a precious estuary. And here came an event of great significance; both for Esther’s life and perhaps her vendetta against Resurgam.
The maritime development presented a challenge, it being problematic to chain oneself to water. So the demonstrators gathered in hired, coerced and pilfered boats. The fleet was sufficiently unseaworthy to be more of a danger to themselves than anyone else, although they did succeed in briefly delaying work.
Dan and Nigel found a couple of the group still living on a houseboat, she being pregnant and they having developed an attachment to the area. Both were in no doubt that in this protest Esther was taking the lead.
‘It was her idea to get the boats in,’ Olly, a young man with bleached blonde hair said.
He was sitting next to K, as she introduced herself. She was a little older, both ears and half her nose perforated with piercings.
‘Cool kid, Esther,’ K agreed, hands protectively across her belly. ‘When the media turned up she waited for a wash from a security boat and capsized one of ours. The pictures were great, we really hammed it up, flailing around and screaming. It made them look like bullies.’
‘What was she like when she was here?’ Dan asked.
‘Real intense, even scary like,’ Olly replied. ‘Totally focused on trying to stop them buggering up the river.’
Dan was about to leave, when a final question occurred to him. ‘She was very young. Why did people follow her?’
It was a few seconds before he got an answer. K and Olly both chewed at the air, then she said, ‘Dunno. We just did. There was something about her. Some sort of… certainty. She made you believe.’
It was only at the end of the demonstration, when the protesters had been dragged from the water, that the dreadful realisation came. One was missing.
A young woman had fallen from a boat, perhaps hit her head, and been under water for several minutes. A rescue operation was launched and she was found. The efforts to save her were successful, up to a point.
The deprivation of oxygen left her in a coma, which was later diagnosed as a persistent vegetative state. She was in hospital in London receiving the best care available, but the outlook was bleak.
Quickly, Dan sped through his pages of notes, looking for confirmation of that which he already knew. And there, on a faded old cutting, he found it.
The young woman’s name was Margaret Hollis, commonly known as Mollie.
On the way back to Devon, Dan called one of the barroom bores from the Red Roe. According to June, Esther had once mentioned a childhood memory being part of her obsession with Resurgam. The connections were snapping together in Dan’s mind. The treasured old friend of intuition was at work.
Yes, he’d be returning to Longstaff soon, he assured the man. And yes, they would share another drink or two. But first, a little information…
Now Dan came to mention it, yes, Esther and her parents did go on an annual summer holiday. And yes, Devon was the destination. When pressed, the barroom crew agreed it was somewhere in the countryside near Plymouth.
A woman was called into the conversation, a lady named Jan. She used to clean for the family when Esther was much younger. Yes, she did remember the summer fortnight to the coast as she kept an eye on the house while they were away. And yes, now it was mentioned, there was something about it which had always stuck in her mind.
Esther had once drawn a series of pictures on her return from one of the breaks. The first showed a young girl at home, on her own, looking out through the window of a large house. Around the walls she’d drawn railings. There were tears on her cheeks.
In the next, a woman and man were on either side of the girl. They were walking across a beach, all smiling broadly. Behind was a blue sea, crested with rolling waves.
Picture three had the trio sitting at a table, eating together, all still smiling. The man was tucking into a piece of toast, the woman drinking from a cup, the girl sipping at something ginger and fizzy.
In the fourth picture the family was making sandcastles. Rock pools covered the beach and a brilliant sun shone in the sky.
The last picture was similar to the first, the girl back at home, alone once more. The sky around the house was filled with clouds.
Did Jan remember the young Esther talking about beaches, all those years ago, Dan asked? Of course beaches featured, she recalled. They would, wouldn’t they? Every kid loved a beach.
Was there anything about Plymouth? Perhaps a memory of a beach there?
There was a pause before the reply came. Jan couldn’t be entirely sure, but yes, that did seem to ring a vague and dusty bell.
Esther lived in the shadows, eschewing mainstream society and the media. There were no interviews with her, and only one example of her speaking out that Dan had been able to find. It was a grainy video, taken by an undercover journalist who was reporting on a protest camp at Hinkley Point Nuclear Power Station.
She was surrounded by countless people as she talked about the importance of their movement. It provided a strong insight into the motivation of the woman, and why people followed her.
“For those who say we haven’t achieved anything, look at our history”, Esther orated, in a voice surprisingly loud and carrying easily above the mass of people. “In the 1980s, we greened even Margaret Thatcher! We saved the ozone layer. We’ve made people across the world aware of the damage they’re doing to the planet and forced countless governments to listen to our demands. We’ve ended the horrors of nuclear power in Germany, we can do it here in Britain.”
There was spontaneous applause, the crowd clearly entranced with the words of this young woman as she rallied them together.
“We’ve become mainstream politics, forced every party to think about the environment. But the pace of change is still too slow. Together we can continue to advance and save this wonderful earth for future generations, instead of the selfishness of using it and abusing it just for ourselves.”
And now her voice fell, grew deeper and more emotional, a change of pace and tone.
“We’ve made such sacrifices. We’ve lost people along the way. Someone I loved lies in a hospital bed because of her commitment to our cause. But we will never be bowed, never give up, because our promise to future generations is resolute. We know our mission is the most important there is on this beautiful planet.”
The last page of Dan’s notes contained material which didn’t make it into the profile, but which he kept for interest. Attached was a tatty cutting from one of the national papers.
The Militant Greens, the story was headlined. It was about the disillusionment of those who had demonstrated on environmental issues. The item listed a top ten of major developments, all of which had proceeded as planned, despite protesters’ attempts at disruption.
“This lack of success has led to a hardening of attitude in some quarters,” the story continued. “A minority are now considering violent protest as the only way to hamper major building projects. They argue their actions would be justified, as nothing less than the future of the planet is at stake”
There were a couple of quotes from unnamed sources to that effect. But it was the conclusion of the article which Dan highlighted.
“We have learned that two environmental activists – a man and a woman - have been arrested and questioned by anti-terrorist police. It’s believed they were researching methods of making explosives using readily available materials. No charges were brought, but police sources have expressed concern, saying the development is a worrying indication of the ever more extreme views of some in the green movement.”
The pair were not named. But the paper did detail the well-known environmental protests of which they had been a part.
Dan ticked off each. The list matched those where Esther had played an increasingly prominent role.
He sat back, breathed out hard and scribbled some words to summarise his thoughts.
Tommy lonely - used by Esther for inside info on Resurgam – like security guard in London?
Unhappy childhood - Mollie, the sister she never had, grievously injured in a demo.
Esther’s only good childhood memories - beach where Resurgam now stands.
Alice very like Mollie? That why Esther so fond of her? Death of Alice means Esther absolutely set on destruction of Resurgam – revenge for both Mollie and Alice?
Nigel knocked on the window of the Satellite Truck. The time was twenty to twelve. A line of security men was assembling outside Resurgam.
Dan stepped down onto the tarmac, flinching at the bitter embrace of the pitiless cold.
The press pack was gathering around the doors. Nigel had already reserved his space with the traditional cameraman’s marker of an emphatically planted tripod.
Dan had just begun walking over to join him when the compound was rocked by the blast of an explosion.
THE BATTLE OF RESURGAM FIVE – ALICE
The snow changed colour that January day.
Collapsed amongst the pasture of white was the black uniform of a young policeman. PC Rogers was still conscious, despite the dreadful wound. He was hunched in a ball, fearful fingers probing a shattered socket and shredded remains where once an eye had been. He was a child again; helpless, crying, screaming and sobbing, ‘Kathy, please. Kathy help me.’
Following the attack came a stillness. The Ecowarriors looked on and to each other, one or two with perhaps an edge of remorse, but most expressionless. The students and rest of the original protest just gaped.
It was June who broke the incantation of horror, her quiet strength taking control. She demanded a mobile phone from Seb and called 999 as she ran over to the stricken man.
Alice and Esme followed, compassion conquering their revulsion. Silently they moved, for there was nothing to say, nothing that could be said.
Mac and Seb remained in the safety of the group. Young men rendered lost by the brutality of life.
Moving fast across the snowy tarmac, June reached PC Steve. He flinched away, tried to hide, protect himself from another attack. But he found instead humanity and empathy, gentle hands reaching for his own.
