4
I walked up the restrictive track and over the cattle grid to the sprawling car park in front of the churchyard, a desolate, uncompromising building. No carved stonework or religious friezes, no stained-glass windows, no bell in the edifice.
As I entered the vestibule, banging echoed throughout the church, taking me a little time to determine its source. Reverend McNally rested at the summit of a run-up on the balcony, perched amidst the rafters, nailing replacement planking along the Southeast elevation of the roof. He wore blue workman's overalls. So concentrated on the job in hand, he didn't realise I stood among the pews watching him from below.
A sudden pause in the hammering as the minister searched for more nails.
"Hello?"
I so startled him, he almost fell off his ladder and required to steady himself with a hand on the nearest rafter. He glanced down but lasted a moment before recognition came. "The funeral procession yesterday."
"Yes, I did. Can you answer some questions for me?"
"Police?"
"No."
The priest hung his hammer from a loop on his belt and started downwards. A little breathless by the time he descended.
After we shook hands, I showed him my ID with a picture of me taken a few years back, lean, and athletic, and not weighed down by life. The flesh around my eyes renounced its tautness and shot through with lines like fine scars.
"How can I help?"
"I understand some intruders got in?"
"Yes, in the tower."
"Please show me"
"Of course."
He headed off up the aisle to the far end and unlocked a door to a masonry staircase. The steps appeared worn and precarious, and spiralled upwards, for an eternity.
We reached the top, the biting wind cut right through me as I scanned across to the shingle headland. Past the twelve-mile-long breakwater, the waves drove in, breaking on the coastline all around the shore in a deafening roar. The spray thrown up by the ocean, thrashing against the granite jetty, where the tied-up landing craft rocked and bobbed around in the swell.
On the beach itself, the wintry light inclined on to the flat, colourless terrain. The moan of the wind, the shriek of and the melancholy boom of the foghorn far out, sent a shiver through me.
The ridge filled all horizons. The level land, the mudflats, the miles of marshes, the salting's, the grey, wrinkled sea. Mid-morning and from where I stood, toward the east, the glistening bogs with their narrow, oozing ditches of water where waders walked with high-stepping delicate legs and emitting mournful cries like they missed something.
A pretty Victorian lighthouse with a bell-shaped roof and a wrought iron balcony looked across the channels to the long, low spit of land. A squadron of hundreds of seagulls, in a formation as tight as a school of fish soared and flicked and dived above the waves.
Further afield, the eminent abomination of the facility, an unavoidable blot on any landscape. If the architect based this foreboding place on early nineteenth-century prisons, which resembled, he couldn't achieve a more repulsive structure.
Grim, grey, and gaunt under the dark skies of the day, the research centre consisted of four parallel rows of squat, flat-topped reinforced structures. The repellent forbidding lifelessness, like condemned and abandoned Victorian tenements in the worst slums of a city.
Each row of buildings, about a quarter of a mile in length, with quite a measure separating the sections. The distance amid the properties and boundary fencing, five hundred yards maximum. No trees, no bushes, no shrubs, not a clump of flowers, and nothing higher grew in the bleak desolation of the grounds of the institute, which stayed the responsibility of the national trust.
Any World War 2 concentration camp commandant would sell his soul for this place. With the fifteen feet high barbed-wire fences like the ones surrounding the complex, man ought to sleep at night.
The outer barricade sloped four feet out of line with the foot. A similar fence slanted the other way, for its entire perimeter at about twenty feet, the space between these remained patrolled by Alsatians and Dobermanns. Beyond, about another ten feet away from the last barrier, each of its five strands running through insulators mounted on concrete posts.
"I found them up here."
"Who?"
"The bird-watchers."
"This view appears flawless for twitchers."
"Their attention appeared focused elsewhere."
"Where?"
"To the abominable eye-sore on the spit."
He pointed his index finger in the direction of the laboratory.
"Did they say anything?"
"Nothing much. They spoke in a language I never heard before, and as soon as I confronted them, they picked up all their gear and left."