Page 75 of Hot Ghost Summer

Property development giant, Clawson & Stoker, is at the centre of a legal battle set for the House of Lords. The land development group claim they bought the three-hundred-and-twenty-acre stretch that runs from Arnos Grove to Cockfosters from local owner and proprietor, Jim Bowen, in good faith. Yet the land has now been seized under the Criminal Justice Act of 1988 until the investigation concludes.

The next article is much more recent. Dated only a couple of years ago, and posted by the Enfield Dispatch.

Decades-Long Deadlock Broken: Bowen’s Farm Development Gets Green Light

After three decades of bitter legal disputes, the London Borough of Cockfosters has officially approved the comprehensive redevelopment of the former greenfield site. The decision, which was passed by a wide margin at the last planning committee session, paves the way for a multi-million-pound regeneration project led by developers Clawson & Stoker.

The next link is for a video. I hesitate, unsure if it’s going to provide news footage from outside a courthouse or something else. Curiosity wins.

The video opens with the warning: The following contains images some may find distressing. Viewer discretion is advised.

My heart rate spikes.

Is it Jim Bowen? Did they find him?

Palms slightly clammy, I continue. A grainy, low-resolution video opens—that looks like the footage of every birthday and Christmas that my parents have from their childhoods in the eighties—and a strange feeling of nostalgia shoots through me.

Whoever’s holding the camcorder is doing a shit job of keeping it still, though, and it takes a while of squinting at the screen to work out what I’m looking at.

Those dark weblike lines are tree branches, the dull grey cast behind them is a winter sky, and the cameraman must be up some kind of wrought-iron fence because the black-painted tips of the railing occasionally come into view.

“That thick smoke…” comes a gruff voice through the video. “If you look through the gap in the trees there, you can just about make it out.”

He pans the camera left and right, but a bit too fast for its capabilities, and the focus turns soft and fuzzy. When it next clarifies, I recognise Pymmes Brook. Specifically, where it diverts into an underground culvert. Which makes that fence he’s standing on the one that encloses that little park just off Cockfosters Tube station. Which makes what he’s filming the Bowen’s Plaza development.

“I came here without my camcorder earlier,” continues the filmmaker. “To check what was going on. And when I realised, I ran home to get it. I’m gonna zoom in the best I can, but it’s not pretty.”

There’s a wobble, then frame by frame, the lens jerks in on a black mass set between two trees.

“That’s Bowen’s Farm.” He confirms my earlier suspicions. “And that, I dunno if it’s picking it up right, is a leg. A hoof. One of his cows.”

I can’t draw a breath. It’s almost like if I do, I’ll smell it.

My heart pounds against my ribs.

“From the way this pyre’s been burning this afternoon, I’d wager that’s not just one cow neither. It smelled like diesel to start, and I thought maybe a tractor’d gone up. But then the smell changed. It’s more like a Sunday roast now.” The man laughs, but it’s a dark laugh. Gallows humour. As if he doesn’t know the right reaction.

The camera wobbles, then spins, then shows the sky—as if he slipped off the railing.

“I reckon his herd must’ve got the disease. It’s been all over the news, but this is the closest it’s been to us. I told the missus when I went back for the camera, and she tried to ring Jim. He didn’t answer. Poor bloke must be devastated. That’s his whole herd going up. Probably used the diesel to offset the rain, and now he’s just standing in it—watching them burn.”

The video ends there, and I sit and stare at the laptop in silence.

Images of that grainy cow leg fill my mind. I’ve never…

My stomach flips.

It wasn’t the best quality footage, but somehow that makes it worse. My mind is filling in the dark gaps of the herd’s funeral pyre with its own twisted images. Brigid has a white marking on her front left leg, just like that heifer did.

I drop my forehead onto the table with a hard thump, forgetting about my cap. I yank it off in anger.

Nausea washes over me, and I wish I could bleach my eyeballs. I can’t even begin to imagine what standing there that day must have been like, but the cows. The poor girls.

I think I’m going to be sick.

Pushing the chair back so fast it falls over, I stride to the sink and fill a cup from the rack with water. It tastes like ash and chemicals.

Discarding it on the counter, I move away, but there isn’t really anywhere else to go. Three steps in that direction puts me closer to the laptop, and that frozen image of the grey sky. Not a winter sky, I realise. Well, not just that. Grey, because it’s literally filled with the evidence of a burning dairy herd.