Our final climate change short story

As part of our tenth birthday celebrations, we organised climate change themed competitions for photographers and short story writers. We have previously published the the winning story - No Need to Panic by Josh Turner - and one of our runners up. Here is our other runner-up: Phil Beardmore.

Phil may be known to some of you as a sustainability consultant in the West Midlands and as a great sustainability tweeter but not as an aspiring writer. Our judging panel described his story as pacy and intriguing, with an enjoyable writing style. So here it is:

Take My Breath Away by Phil Beardmore

"I wish Prabhan would turn the music down," said Abdullah to his wife Yasmine. "It's not like him at all. Same tune, over and over again."

Abdullah turned the light off.

The next morning Abdullah was surprised to hear the music still playing from Prabhan Mistry's house. His new neighbours in Birmingham had welcomed him and Yasmine with open arms when they had arrived from Kurdistan. It was now time for him to be a good neighbour.

There was no reply when he knocked at the door of the large Edwardian villa. Nargis the PCSO walked past.

"Watching every motion in my foolish lover's game / On this endless ocean, finally lovers know no shame ..." she heard.

.............

"Formic acid," said pathologist Dr Rachel MacLeod to DI Leonora Burrows.

"Whoever killed him knew that Mistry was vulnerable to anaphylactic shock, and that administering just a small dose while the victim was tied to the chair would cause him to die of asphyxia quickly.”

Burrows hacked into Mistry's Facebook account rather easily.

"What on earth is the Buteyko Defence League?" she asked.

Charles N'Daw, a fifteen year old on a work placement with the police, Googled the answer. "Buteyko is a breathing method, named after a Russian professor. It's used to treat the symptoms of asthma."

Burrows had already learned that Mistry was a complementary therapist. "That makes sense," she said, "but what about the BDL?"

"Not a trace," said Charles, "must be some kind of secret society."

......................

Scanning Prabhan's academic year diary, Burrows found a mysterious appointment for the following day. Only the time and an address in Malvern, a spa town thirty miles distant, were listed.

Behind the stone wall was a house. It looked abandoned. A metal grille had been secured across the entrance to the driveway. Burrows went round to the back, where she found a door ajar. About ten people sat in a circle on deck chairs in the unfurnished room.

"Buteyko has been practised for centuries under different names. Witches taught it here at St Anne's Mount a thousand years ago," explained Cass Murdoch, leader of the BDL. "It's always been open source, there are about 30 Buteyko practitioners in the West Midlands, nobody owns it. But PharmaCorp have decided that they somehow own the Buteyko method. These are the same people who persuaded the EU that they owned the copyright to the medicinal use of the calendula plant.

People have used calendula as a traditional remedy for thousands of years but now complementary therapists are threatened with crippling fines by PharmaCorp if they use it. Now PharmaCorp are trying to persuade the EU that Buteyko is their IP, so only people who buy licences from them will be allowed to use it. In the USA they are physically threatening Buteyko practitioners. That's why we meet in secret. They employ mercenaries, ex Army people who carry out Black Operations and

False Flag attacks in Afghanistan, to terrorise people."

......................

Back at Lloyd House in Birmingham, Burrows received an anonymous letter with a Malvern postcode. Within an hour Nigel Allen was in the interrogation room, the same room where, forty years earlier, corrupt police officers had extracted false confessions from six Irish men admitting to the Birmingham pub bombings.

"So you're a mercenary?"

"Freelance security consultant."

"Where were you on Tuesday night?"

"I can't say, I'm bound by the Official Secrets Act."

DI Burrows knew that Allen wasn't subtle enough to use formic acid poisoning as an execution technique.

..................

Cass Murdoch wasn't difficult to trace. She was listed as a complementary therapist on the website wahanda.com.

"I didn't know Prabhan that well. He ran Buteyko and other complementary therapy sessions from his front room. He used the income to fund his PhD."

"What was he studying?"

"The impact of climate change on asthma. At the University of Uppsala."

..............

It took less than an hour in the hire car from Stockholm airport. Prabhan's supervisor, Professor Ulrike Vanger, was devastated to hear of his death. She was easily able to access Prabhan Mistry's work on the University's server. His studies had gone off at a tangent - from the effects of climate change on asthma to the efforts of oil companies to deny those effects.

"It's their latest tactic," explained Professor Vanger. "In the same way as the oil companies funded phoney think-tanks like Global Warming Policy Institute to deny the science behind climate change, they are now funding a small band of cranks called the Air Quality Research Institute to 'prove' that climate change is having no impact on air quality."

"How much do you know about the Air Quality Research Institute?"

"Prabhan found out quite a bit about them. Their founder is Colonel Arthur Krulak, a Vietnam veteran whose background is in the petrochemical industry. He is rumoured to have links to rightwing terrorist organisations of various kinds such as those responsible for the Oklahoma bombing. Krulak's right-hand woman is Dame Esther Knight, a former UK government minister who had to step down due to expenses fiddling. She was rewarded with a Damehood and the Chairmanship of the Aluminium Foundation."

"What's the connection?"

"The Aluminium Foundation is a seemingly respectable body promoting the value of Aluminium in everyday applications. They funded a controversial piece of research. The Camellia plant, whose dried leaves we know as tea, absorbs aluminium from the soil through its roots in large quantities. Aluminium is known to be carthogenic under certain circumstances. The research found that there was no link between absorbed Aluminium and cancer."

"So what?"

"I went to a meeting at the Aluminium Foundation. We were invited into their staff kitchen to make ourselves a drink. We Swedes prefer coffee, but the Brits wanted tea. But the Aluminium Foundation don't have any teabags in their staff kitchen."

...................

Burrows couldn't trace the movements of Colonel Krulak. She thought it worth a visit to Dame Esther's detached house in Surrey. Dame Esther was immediately on the defensive and refused to say a word without her solicitor present. Burrows invited the solicitor to meet them at the local police station, where Dame Esther would be kept overnight.

...................

DI Burrows declined the offer of a hotel in Surrey and drove back to Birmingham for the night. As she pulled up outside her apartment building in the city's fashionable Jewellery Quarter, her suspicions were aroused by a Cars4U electric hire car outside. A scheme designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions had been hijacked by petty criminals who paid for the vehicles using stolen credit cards.

When Burrows reached her apartment on the third floor, her front door was already open. She drew her firearm as she had been trained to do. She was not surprised to find two visitors from Cheltenham sitting on her Ikea sofa.

Within an hour Burrows had reluctantly given the order for Dame Esther Knight to be released without charge. She sighed as the two spooks left. It wasn't the first time she had been prevented from enforcing the rule of law by people in the pay of multinational corporations and the governments that serve them. It wouldn't be the last.

DISCLAIMER

This is a work of fiction and any resemblance to actual person, body corporate or event is coincidental.