Free The Peco Incident by Des Hunt Page A

the screen was one of the photos he’d taken inside the Peco sheds. ‘What are you looking at those for?’ I asked.
    ‘Nothing!’
    I let out a sigh: he was a lousy liar.
    ‘What have you done?’
    For a while he seemed to weigh up his options. Eventually he mumbled, ‘I sent them to the TV station.’
    ‘You what?’
    ‘I sent them—’
    ‘I heard the first time!’ I yelled. Then a little more quietly, I added, ‘Why?’
    He lifted his head. ‘I think people should know what was happening in there. He shouldn’t be allowed to keep animals like that.’
    Now I understood. ‘It’s because of what Brio said, isn’t it?’
    ‘Yeah, I suppose so.’
    ‘And it doesn’t matter that we’ll be in trouble for trespassing and that Dad will lose his job?’
    ‘That won’t happen,’ he said. ‘They’ll never know where the photos came from.’ He then explained how he’d set up a new webmail address in the name of Broost99. The photos had been sent as an attachment from there.
    By the time the explanation was finished, his normal confidence had returned. In fact he was almost bragging about what he’d done. I certainly wasn’t so confident. I had a feeling that if someone really wanted to find out which computer had sent the images, then they would. Even the name he chose could be linked to Brio and Roost, and on to us. However, there was nothing I could do about it now except wait and see.

    In the morning, Cecil the canary was dead. That started a breakfast-table conversation about whether we should tell BIRT or not. Mum said it was the responsible thing to do; Dad was worried that they might come and investigate. ‘I don’t want anyone around here asking questions,’ he argued. ‘We’ll be in deep trouble if anyone finds out we went into those sheds.’
    I kept my mouth firmly closed, hoping that Nick would dothe same. This was not the time to reveal that pretty soon the whole country might know where we’d been.
    In the end Mum convinced Dad that the sparrows had carried the disease here, and that BIRT would understand that. So, Nick and I were given the task of telling the BIRT person in Portobello.
    The motel was part-way up Murph’s street. As we turned off the main road, I wondered if Murph knew that BIRT was now one of his neighbours.
    There was no problem finding the person we wanted at the motel. A sandwich board outside the unit nearest the office declared it to be the
BIRT On-Site Reporting Station.
We knocked on the door.
    ‘Hello, you two,’ said a cheerful voice as the door slid open. It was Cathy Andrews. ‘Come on in. Welcome to my temporary home.’
    We followed her inside and took the offered chairs. The eating area had been changed to an office, with a large map of the peninsula leaning against the wall, and a laptop on the table surrounded by a pile of papers.
    She saw me looking at the pile and smiled. ‘Yes, my boss, Colin Saxton, has made sure I’ve got plenty of work to do, just in case nobody comes and sees me.’
    ‘Are we your first customers?’ asked Nick.
    She nodded. ‘And hopefully the only ones. We’re beginning to think that the worst of the epidemic might be over.’
    ‘It’s not,’ I said. ‘Cecil, our canary, died during the night.’
    ‘Where do you live?’ she asked.
    ‘Harwood.’
    She beckoned me over to the map. ‘Show me.’
    I did, and she marked it with a coloured pin.
    ‘Do you have sparrows around there?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and they used to pinch food from Cecil’s cage.’
    ‘Seen any dead ones?’
    I shook my head. She turned to Nick, who shook his head as well.
    She studied the map for a while. ‘I think,’ she said slowly, ‘that those sparrows might have come from Portobello. You’re within their range. Just.’
    ‘Could they have passed it on to the local sparrows?’
    ‘Yes, but you’d be seeing dead ones if they had. This time of year, when they’re breeding, the various populations of sparrows tend to keep to