Heather sighs and I’m certain, without a doubt, that she knows. She knows exactly what he was doing and who he was doing it with but she’s not meant to tell me because it was something wrong. It’s a look I’ve seen in A and E more times than I can count on the teenagers’ faces when I ask, “What has your friend taken?” The truth is always there, written on their faces. They desperately don’t want to say anything but they know, of course they know. Sometimes honesty can feel like a betrayal.
“No one’s going to think badly of him, you know,” I say.
“You don’t know that,” Heather shoots back.
“People will focus on the thing—whatever it is—that caused the virus, not him. Euan didn’t create this. It wasn’t his fault. It doesn’t matter if he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, doing something illegal even.” Ah, there it is. The vein in Heather’s neck jumps and her mouth tightens. What could he have been doing that brought him into contact with the virus? “What matters is that it will help us find a vaccine, and stop this ever happening again. No one will think this is Euan’s fault, I promise.”
Heather closes her eyes, and her shoulders drop a little. The defensiveness is starting to melt away. “He and Donal had been friends for a long time. Money’s tight around here, especially in the winter. Donal started asking Euan to help out with the odd job here and there a few years ago. Driving packages across to the mainland, collecting things and bringing them back over. Euan never asked what was in them, and Donal never said.”
“And Euan told you all of this at the time?”
“He told me everything, he felt better knowing I knew. I should have told him it was a bad idea working with Donal but we needed the money and . . .” She shrugs with a look of regret so all-consuming it’s a wonder she’s still upright. I realize there’s one thing Heather and I both have in common, shining through our interaction. Guilt.
“I should have done things differently but I thought, we thought it would be okay. I never in a million years . . . then, last year there were shipments. The ships would be a few miles from shore, Donal and Euan would take a boat out and take, well, whatever it was, back to Bute and then over to the mainland.”
My palms are clammy with a mix of anxiety and excitement; I’m on the edge of finding out what I so desperately need to know, and yet it’s painful to be so close to the heart of the Plague, the thing that has destroyed my life. “Do you know what they were moving?”
She shakes her head. “He never said but I know where he used to store the boxes overnight. It’s a locked shed.” Maybe there’s something left, a box, a note, anything could help.
“Heather, have you told anyone this before?” She shakes her head, her eyes filling with tears.
“No, I didn’t want our sons to think badly of him, but they . . .” She drifts off and I understand.
“Two boys?” I ask, already knowing the answer. She nods. “Me too. Charlie and Josh.”
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers and it feels like the most honest display of sympathy I’ve seen in the awful, lonely months since I lost my family.
“I’m sorry for you too, Heather. I really am.” I brush my hand over my cheeks, as though efficiently removing my tears somehow makes me more professional. “Could you show me where the boxes were stored?”
As we drive down the coast in Heather’s tiny Nissan, the gas meter so low I develop a nervous tic watching it, I get the sense she doesn’t leave her house very often. She drives nervously, hands clamped to the top of the wheel, looking out fearfully for something, anything, that might scare her. We reach the rocky shore on a deserted bit of beach surrounded by scrubland and a few blinking cows. A few minutes of walking later, we arrive at a small wooden shed locked with a padlock.
“This is the storage shed,” Heather says through chattering teeth. “He told me where it was ‘just in case.’” I use a rock to break the rusty lock and the door swings open to reveal four wooden boxes stacked on top of one another. I was so convinced it would be empty, how could it not be? I slide the top of one of the boxes open, expecting guns or drugs or cigarettes. As soon as I see what’s inside, and smell it, I turn my head away and retch.