The Peco Incident (6 page)

‘She saw it,’ said Nick, jumping up and down beside me. ‘She saw it.’

Yes, she’d seen it, and had clearly been deeply affected by its horror. When she’d finished, she stood and wandered aimlessly in circles for a time before pulling out her phone.

That’s when Shreeves reappeared. His body language suggested that he now knew he was in real trouble. This time he pleaded with her. It worked no better than the earlier bullying. She made the phone call anyway.

It was almost an hour later when the biosecurity team arrived. By then we’d moved back to the gate to wait with Cathy. A very unhappy Bryce Shreeves had unlocked the gate and disappeared again.

Cathy wouldn’t talk about what she’d seen in the shed, other than to say that she’d seen dead and dying animals. When Nick asked whether it was bird flu or not, she said she didn’t know, claiming that many bird diseases had very similar symptoms. They’d have to wait for the test results.

I’d visualized the biosecurity people arriving in a couple of vehicles and going quietly about their work. It was nothing like
that. Vehicle after vehicle drove up the side road, until they were packed end to end as far back as we could see.

A man jumped out of the first one and marched over to where Cathy was standing. Nick and I had slipped back a bit to be out of the way. Nick was taking photos of the vehicles with his phone.

‘Who are they?’ demanded the man, pointing at us.

‘They’re the boys who reported the dead birds.’

‘Thank them, and get rid of them. They have to be outside the quarantine zone. Pronto!’

Before Cathy could respond, the man had turned and left.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘But you’ve got to go.’

‘Who’s he to order us around?’ asked Nick.

‘Colin Saxton. He’s the Incident Controller. He has the power to order you around whenever he wants. He can even have you arrested.’

Nick looked daggers at the man, who had begun issuing orders to the rest of the team.

‘Can you give us a ride back to our bikes?’ I asked.

Cathy looked at her car, now blocked in by several other vehicles. She shook her head. ‘Sorry. You’ll have to walk.’ She fished in her pocket and pulled out a card. ‘This has all my contact details. Give me a call or email me tomorrow and I’ll let you know what we’ve found out. OK?’

We nodded our acceptance and started the long walk back to the café.

As we went past the biosecurity vehicles, we got some idea of what would be involved once they moved into the compound.
There was a mobile cafeteria, a toilet block, and a command centre. Through the windows of a bus we saw people putting on full protective suits. One truck, labelled
Decontamination Unit,
was a big, walk-through shower. Behind it were tankers labelled with multiple hazardous-chemical symbols. Then there were the closed vans that had no markings whatsoever.

I found it both exciting and scary. The scary part was the precautions these people were taking to protect themselves. They were wearing spacesuits to go into the same place where Dad and I had gone with nothing more than a builder’s dust mask. Nick hadn’t even had that! I wondered whether Mr Colin Saxton would have been so keen to get rid of us if he’d known where we’d been during the night.

There were a couple of hundred metres of empty road before we got to the T-junction. There we found many more vehicles. However, these were not parked neatly in lines; they were all over the place, making it impossible for others to get through. They were the vans, cars and motorbikes of the various news media.

A barrier blocking access into the side road was manned by police. Other officers were trying to sort out the chaos of vehicles. They were having little success, as the media personnel were too busy talking into microphones, or scribbling in notebooks.

After watching for a while, we continued towards Portobello.

There we found more media: a television crew was interviewing the people from the café. I recognized the interviewer as Jim Black. He did a current events programme on NetNews
that Mum and Dad enjoyed watching.

Unfortunately, I had to leave Nick to watch by himself, as I was busting to go to the toilet. Then I had to wait for someone else to finish, and, by the time I got back outside, Nick was in front of the camera being interviewed.

My gut tightened. There was no predicting what he might say. I was too far away to hear what was being said, but I could see that Nick was enjoying himself. He showed none of the nerves I knew I would suffer if I were being interviewed. He chatted away as if he and Jim Black were best mates.

Then I noticed he had his phone in his hand. The clamps on my gut tightened further. On that phone were the photos he’d taken inside the chook farm: photos that all of the media would love to get their hands on.

As I watched, Jim Black pointed to Nick’s hand and asked a question. Nick lifted the phone and pressed a few buttons before holding it out towards Jim. I brought my hands to my head, hoping to shut out what was about to happen. Then, without warning, the whole of Portobello resounded to a loud blast from an air horn.

I jumped, Nick jumped, so too did Jim Black. The cameraman, however, calmly turned his lens towards the source of the noise. A fire engine was coming down the road from Dunedin. It gave two more blasts as it approached the intersection. Then it turned and roared off towards the chook farm.

No sooner had it gone than the cameraman, interviewer and sound engineer were sprinting towards their vehicle. A moment later it, too, was roaring up the road.

I let out a long sigh of relief as it disappeared around a bend. I also made a mental note that, in future, Nicholas Clarke and reporters should be kept well clear of each other, or those photos would end up everywhere.

A
s peace returned to the Portobello shops, I noticed Murph sitting in his usual place outside the pub. We wandered over.

He looked up as we approached. ‘Are you two the cause of all of that?’

‘Some of it,’ I replied.

His eyes twinkled for a moment. ‘You didn’t set fire to Shreeves’s place, did you?’

‘No. Nothing was on fire when we were there.’ ‘Somebody needs to set fire to it,’ said Nick, with feeling. Murph shook his head. ‘Not with the chooks in there, mate. If they weren’t there, I’d agree with you.’

‘They’ll all be gone soon anyway,’ replied Nick. ‘Half of them are dead already.’

Murph turned and raised his eyebrows at me. ‘You been inside?’

‘Last night,’ I said quietly.

‘What was it like?’

We told him. I knew our secret would be safe with Murph. He rarely spoke to other people, and when he did it was only ever about horses.

‘Mongrel!’ he said when we’d finished. Then, after a pause: ‘You know, he tried to get rid of all my birds once. Said they were a possible source of disease.’ Murph let out a humourless laugh. ‘That’s ironic, isn’t it? Accusing
my
birds when now it’s his that are the source.’

‘What happened?’ asked Nick.

‘Oh,
Councillor
Shreeves turned up at my place with some officials, insisting that the birds be destroyed. We had a real barney, screaming at each other. It was just after protestors had got into his sheds and taken photos. I’d seen them on TV, so I had plenty of shots to fire back at him.’ Murph thought for a moment. ‘I think that’s what it was all about. He was trying to deflect attention away from the problems at his place. Anyway, the officials inspected all my aviaries and made a list of things I had to clean up, and that was the end of it. Fortunately, the only native I had at the time was Harriet and she was asleep in the house. If Shreeves and his lackeys had seen her, I would’ve been done for.’

‘Has he ever been back?’ asked Nick.

‘Nah. The only times I’ve seen him since have been when he’s posing on TV.’

‘You know he might try and blame you again,’ I said quietly.

Murph stared at me. ‘Oh, shit! You don’t think he would, do you?’

I shrugged. ‘Probably not,’ I replied, wishing I hadn’t said anything in the first place. ‘Even if he did, who’s going to believe him?’

The biosecurity emergency was the main story on NetNews that night. They’d dubbed it ‘The Peco Incident’. One of the reporters was live on the scene, filmed standing on a hillside with the Peco compound as a backdrop. While she said a lot, there was little information.

Only slightly more informative was a recorded piece showing Colin Saxton reading a formal statement. It said that the Biosecurity Incident Response Team was investigating the deaths of a significant number of birds at the Peninsula Egg Company farm near Portobello. The cause of death was, as yet, unknown, and it would be at least two days before a definite identification was possible. In the meantime, the area surrounding the farm would be quarantined. He took questions, but fudged the answers in a way that revealed nothing new.

Next we learnt about the fire that had occurred just as the biosecurity team was entering the compound. It was in one of the smaller buildings. The coverage showed the fire engine rushing through Portobello, followed by some aerial shots of the burnt-out building, which the voice-over said was thought to
contain incubators. There was then some archive film of Bryce Shreeves behaving the way a successful businessman and public figure should. You would have thought it was a different person to the one we had witnessed bullying Cathy earlier that day.

We had to wait until Jim Black’s segment to see Nick’s interview. It started with a history of Peco. They had some archive footage recorded when the farm was the target of animal-rights activists: shots taken inside the sheds showing chooks cramped in cages, many with feathers missing, including a couple of dead ones.

Dad and I looked at each other grimly. The images they were showing were bad, but nothing like what we had seen. I suspected he was thinking much the same as me: the photos Nick had taken were dynamite. I glanced over to Nick and saw a big, knowing grin on his face. If he didn’t understand how valuable his photos were before, he certainly did now.

More old film of Bryce Shreeves followed. This time he was justifying battery farming.

‘Peco is consistently one of the biggest-selling brands in local supermarkets,’ he said, looking directly at the camera. ‘That’s because our eggs are the best and the cheapest. People want cheap, fresh eggs, and the only way to do that is by intensive farming. But it is not cruel farming. If the birds were not contented, they would not lay eggs. Yes, birds do die. All living things do. The two dead birds illegally filmed by those trespassers were two amongst fifty thousand living birds. Believe me, there is nothing happening at Peco that is either inhumane or cruel. You have my word on that.’

‘Yeah, right!’ said Jim Black, when the clip finished. ‘Then why is the place now getting such close attention from BIRT? We asked them that question, only to be referred back to the official press release. So, we decided to go out and ask the people on the Otago Peninsula what they thought was happening at the Peco farm.’

Several short interviews followed. Some spoke about the dead sparrows they’d seen; others said they always knew there was something wrong with Peco; a few were worried about the effect any disease might have on the local wildlife.

Then Brio and Roost were on the screen, wearing their most colourful clothes. They were standing at the back of their van.

‘Hey!’ yelled Nick, jumping out of his seat. ‘Just as well I cleaned it, eh?’

‘Shut up!’ I screamed, leaning forward to push him out of the way. I didn’t want to miss a single word of what these two might say.

‘We are so disgusted,’ said Brio, in her Scottish accent. ‘We came to New Zealand because it has an image of being clean, green and pure. Now we find there is battery farming here. Battery farms are incubators for bird diseases. They should be banned worldwide. We’re amazed that New Zealand still allows such barbaric farming practices, especially so close to some of the world’s most endangered wildlife.’

Beside her, Roost was nodding at every point she made.

Brio continued. ‘What will happen if the disease spreads to the penguins and albatrosses?’ She shook her head in dismay. ‘I dread to think. It will be an ecological disaster. The eyes of
the world will be on New Zealand, and they won’t like what they see.’