Peat and Testimony

I

The machine operator was a Pole named Tomasz and he’d been running the excavator since half five. He said he felt the bucket catch on something at the lower face and he thought it was wood — the black oak that sometimes surfaced from the deep peat, compressed and dense as iron, thousands of years of pressure turning tree into stone. He reversed the bucket. He got down from the cab. He walked to the edge of the cutting and looked down.

What he saw was a boot.

Sergeant Rab Duthie arrived at Moss Hill Peat Works at 7:40 AM in a marked Vauxhall that needed its front nearside tyre replaced. He’d been told a body. He’d not been told what kind. In twenty-three years of uniformed policing in Inverclyde Division he had attended fourteen sudden deaths, all of them explicable within the first hour: heart attacks, falls, one drowning in the marina, one overdose behind the Tesco Express. Bodies found in industrial peat cuttings were not in his experience.

The cutting face was twelve feet deep and sixty yards across, a raw wound in the hillside where the machines had been working backward through the bog. The peat was dark, almost black at the lower depths, and it had a smell that was not decay — vegetable, acidic, cold. Rab stood at the lip and looked down.

The body lay partially embedded in the peat wall, below and to the left of where the excavator had been working. One arm was free. Both legs. The torso was still held by the peat, which had compressed around it. The skin of the exposed arm was dark brown, tanned by the bog acids, and for a bad fifteen seconds Rab thought they were looking at an archaeological find — one of those bog bodies, Iron Age, preserved for millennia. He’d seen the one in the National Museum in Edinburgh on a school trip forty years ago.

Then Constable Ailsa Rennie, who was already down in the cutting, pointed at the feet.

Modern work boots. Steel-toed. The rubber soles still yellow.

Rab went down. The ladder was aluminium, propped against the cutting face by one of the plant workers. At the bottom the ground was wet — not mud exactly, but saturated peat that gave under his weight and held the impression of his boots. He could feel the cold coming up through his soles. The air in the cutting was different from the air above — heavier, colder, smelling of earth and acid.

He stood three feet from the body and looked at it. The face was turned toward the peat wall. The hair was dark. The hands were large, the knuckles thickened. A working man’s hands. One of the fingernails on the left hand was torn. There was peat packed under the others, black crescents.

“Do we have a name?” he asked Ailsa.

She checked her notebook. “Gheorghe Balan. Romanian. Twenty-nine. He was on the books here through an agency.” She spelled the first name for him. He didn’t write it down because he wouldn’t have known which letters to put where.

Tomasz was sitting on the step of his excavator, forty yards away, smoking and not looking at anything. Three other workers stood near the drying shed in a loose group, speaking a language Rab didn’t recognise. A man in a high-vis vest — the site foreman, Rab assumed — was on the phone near the weighbridge, walking in tight circles. He was speaking loudly and Rab could hear fragments: “No, the lower face” and “I told them not to” and “How the fuck should I know.” The foreman’s name was Gavin something. Rab would learn it later and forget it twice.

The forensic palynologist arrived from Edinburgh at eleven. Her name was Dr. Fiona Kemp and she was younger than Rab expected, mid-thirties, with short red hair and a canvas bag full of equipment he couldn’t identify. She worked at the edge of the cutting face with a coring tool — a slender tube that she pushed into the peat wall with steady, even pressure, twisting as she drove it deeper. She extracted the core in sections, each one a cylinder of compressed material that she laid on a plastic sheet in sequence.

Rab watched her. He didn’t understand what she was doing but he recognised something in the methodology — the patience, the care, the attention to material that anyone else would dismiss as dirt.

“What are you looking for?” he asked.

“Time,” she said. She held up a section of core, dark at one end, lighter at the other. “Pollen grains. They’re nearly indestructible. Every season, every year, the peat preserves what was growing above it. This core goes back about three hundred years.” She pointed at a faint band of lighter material. “See that? That’s a period of heavier birch pollen. It tells me something changed on the surface — maybe clearing, maybe planting.”

Rab’s stomach was bad. It had been bad since he looked down into the cutting and saw the yellow boot soles. He had sandwiches in the car — cheese and pickle, made at six that morning, wrapped in cling film like his mother used to wrap his father’s pieces for the yard. He went to the car at lunchtime, sat behind the wheel, took the sandwiches out of the glovebox, unwrapped them, looked at them, wrapped them again, and put them in the bin.

He didn’t know why.

At a depth of fifteen centimetres, the core sample shows elevated levels of Calluna vulgaris pollen consistent with active heather moorland, and trace particulate from modern diesel combustion.

II

Three weeks before the body was found, Rab was at his desk processing a noise complaint. The complainant was a Mrs. Beattie who lived in one of the pebble-dashed semis on Kilmacolm Road, three hundred yards from the boundary of the peat works. She said the machinery started before six, sometimes as early as quarter past five, and the vibration came through the walls and rattled her kitchen shelves. She said she’d been keeping a diary.

Rab typed the complaint into the system. Location: Moss Hill Peat Works. Nature of complaint: Noise / Vibration. Action required: Letter to site operator re: planning conditions. He did not visit the plant. There was no procedure that required him to visit the plant for a noise complaint. He drafted the letter, printed it, signed it, put it in the internal mail tray for dispatch.

He had driven past Moss Hill a thousand times. It sat on the B786 between the town and the moor, visible from the road as a cluster of low corrugated buildings behind a chain-link fence, with stacks of compressed peat bales shrink-wrapped in plastic standing in rows along the yard. Sometimes there were figures in the cutting face — small against the hillside, working with hand tools or moving loads in wheelbarrows. From the road they looked like anyone.

The football coaching was on Saturday mornings at the astroturf behind the leisure centre. Rab ran the under-12s. Fourteen boys, two of whom had any talent, six of whom had parents who dropped them off and didn’t come back until noon, the other six belonging to parents who stood on the sideline in the rain and shouted instructions that contradicted everything Rab had just said. He liked it. He liked the simplicity of it — a ball, two goals, a pitch with white lines. Things that were what they were.

The community council met on the first Tuesday of every month in the church hall on John Street. The carpet was the colour of dried blood and had been there since 1987. The ceiling tiles were water-stained in patterns that looked like topographical maps of countries that didn’t exist. Sixteen people attended regularly. Donald Petrie sat in the second row, right-hand side, and nodded to Rab when he came in. Rab nodded back. They’d been nodding at each other for nine years, since Petrie took over the plant from his uncle. They had never had a conversation longer than three sentences. The nods were a form of municipal recognition — two men acknowledging each other’s continued existence within the same postcode.

At four in the morning Rab stood in his kitchen in his underwear. The headache had woken him. Not sharp, not throbbing, but flat, as if someone had pressed a warm iron against the inside of his forehead and held it there. He filled a glass of water from the tap and washed down two paracetamol. The flat was above what had been a chip shop until March 2020. It had never reopened. The extraction fans were still bolted to the outside wall and sometimes the wind turned them and the sound came up through the floor — a low rhythmic clicking, like something counting.

He stood at the kitchen window and looked out at the alley behind the building. The sodium light was orange and dirty. On the brick wall opposite, moss grew in a thick mat from a cracked downpipe where water had been running for years. Sphagnum. His grandmother had told him, when he was seven or eight, that women from Greenock had gathered sphagnum moss during the wars and sent it to field hospitals. It soaked up blood. Twenty times its weight, she’d said.

His grandmother’s hands had been red and hard. She’d worked the gutting sheds in Tarbert before the war and never got the smell entirely out of her skin.

He looked at the moss on the wall. He looked at his hands on the glass. The paracetamol hadn’t started working. His stomach hurt in a way he would later recognise as the beginning of something, but at four in the morning in February, standing in a cold kitchen above a dead chip shop, he put it down to the cheese toastie he’d had for dinner and went back to bed.

He did not know that at that moment, three hundred yards from Mrs. Beattie’s rattling shelves, a man named Gheorghe Balan was lying awake in a shipping container that had been fitted with plywood partitions and a gas ring, listening to the wind cross the moor and thinking about a four-year-old girl named Alina, who that week had lost her first tooth and whose mother had sent him a photograph that he kept in the zippered pocket of his work jacket, face down.

At thirty centimetres, the sample shows a transition from surface vegetation to partially humified peat, with Sphagnum spore concentrations indicating sustained waterlogged conditions over multiple decades.

III

Two months before the body was found, Janet Fosse arrived at Moss Hill Peat Works in a silver Kia with a cracked wing mirror and a boot full of files from the previous three inspections she’d done that week. She was a Health and Safety enforcement officer for the local authority. She’d held the position for eleven years. She carried a clipboard with a printed checklist and a digital camera that the council had issued in 2019 and never replaced.

Donald Petrie met her at the gate. He was a man of fifty-five with thinning ginger hair and a face that looked like it had been designed to express reasonable concern. He wore a fleece with the company logo — a stylised peat stack, brown on green — and clean work boots that had never been near the cutting face. He shook her hand. He offered tea. She declined. She always declined tea on inspections because accepting hospitality complicated the power dynamic in ways the training manual had described and she had memorised.

Petrie walked her through the yard. The baling machinery was housed in a corrugated shed with a concrete floor. Fosse noted the fire extinguisher dates: current. The emergency exit signage: adequate. The first aid kit on the wall near the foreman’s office: sealed, within expiry. She checked the boxes. She took photographs. The machinery had guards on the moving parts and the guards had guards — secondary cages welded over the primary shields, which was either admirable caution or a response to a previous incident that hadn’t been reported. She didn’t ask which.

They walked through the drying shed. Slabs of raw peat lay on metal racks, air-drying before compression. The smell was thick and earthy. Temperature and humidity readings were logged on a whiteboard near the door. Fosse copied them into her form.

They did not visit the cutting face.

Fosse noted this. She wrote in her report: “Cutting face not inspected due to active operations at time of visit. Site operator to provide photographic evidence of working conditions at cutting face within 14 days.” She knew the photographs would arrive. They always did. Petrie was a compliant man. He understood the rhythm of regulation — what to show, what to photograph, what to document, and how to present a version of operations that satisfied the form without necessarily resembling the operation.

She had forty-seven sites on her inspection list this quarter. Seventeen had been carried over from the previous quarter because the council had cut the environmental health department’s travel budget by twelve per cent. The remaining thirty had to be completed in eleven weeks. She spent an average of ninety minutes per site. At Moss Hill she spent eighty.

As Fosse walked from the drying shed back toward the yard, a man passed her carrying a tushkar — a flanged peat-cutting spade with a right-angled heel, the kind of tool that hadn’t changed in design for two hundred years. The man was in his late twenties, dark-haired, wearing a work jacket that was too large for him and boots caked in black peat up to the ankles. He didn’t look at her. She didn’t look at him. He was carrying a tool from one location to another. Workers carried tools. It was not remarkable.

Her report, filed four days later, ran to three pages. It included the fire extinguisher dates, the emergency signage assessment, the first aid inventory, the machinery guarding notes, the temperature and humidity readings, the observation about the cutting face, and a concluding paragraph: “No significant concerns noted. Operator demonstrates satisfactory awareness of health and safety obligations. Next routine inspection in twelve months.”

The report contained twenty-three data points. None of them were people. The form had categories for equipment, signage, ventilation, hazardous materials, electrical safety, structural integrity, and fire risk. It did not have a category for workers.

The report was filed and the system received it and the system was satisfied. The system had not failed. The system had performed exactly as designed. It had inspected what it was built to inspect — things, not people — and it had found those things adequate. This was the box ticked, the form completed, the process followed. A man slept in a shipping container and cut peat with a tool from the Bronze Age and sent money to Craiova and did not appear in any report, on any form, in any system, anywhere.

At fifty centimetres, Betula and Alnus pollen dominate, indicating birch-alder woodland cover. A thin mineral layer suggests a period of surface erosion, possibly linked to historical land clearance.

IV

Four months before the body was found, Gheorghe Balan started work at the cutting face.

Krzysztof showed him. Krzysztof was from Lublin, fifty-two years old, with a back that had been bad for three years and hands like root systems. He’d been at Moss Hill for two seasons. He spoke enough English to explain the tushkar — how to hold it, how to position the flanged blade against the peat wall, how to drive it in with a vertical thrust using the weight of your shoulders, not your arms, and how to lever the block free with a twist of the wrist.

“Like this,” Krzysztof said. He demonstrated. The blade went in clean and the peat block came away in a single piece, wet and heavy, black as liver. He held it up. “Good peat. Deep peat. This is money.”

Gheorghe took the tool. The handle was smooth from use, the grain worn into shallow grooves where hundreds of hands had gripped it. He positioned the blade. He drove it in. Too shallow — the block crumbled when he tried to lever it free. He tried again. Better. The third time, the block came away whole.

“You learn fast,” Krzysztof said. This was not praise. It was an observation. In Krzysztof’s experience, men who learned fast also lasted longer, and men who lasted longer sent more money home, and men who sent more money home stayed even when they should leave. He did not say any of this.

By the end of the first week Gheorghe had a rhythm. The work started at half five and ran until the light went, which in November meant half four. Eleven hours of cutting, stacking, hauling. The cutting face smelled different at different depths — the upper peat was fibrous and brown and smelled like cold tea, and the deeper peat was dense and black and had no smell he could name. He noticed the colour changes. He noticed how the peat at the top of the face was loose and fibrous and how it compacted and darkened as you went deeper until at the very bottom it was dense and slick, more stone than soil. He noticed the occasional gleam of ancient wood — black oak, preserved — and once a hazel nut, sitting in the peat face as if someone had pressed it there that morning. It was four thousand years old. He didn’t know that. He put it in his pocket.

The bothy was a twenty-foot shipping container on a concrete pad behind the drying shed. Petrie had fitted it with plywood partitions, six sleeping spaces, a gas ring connected to a Calor bottle, a cold tap that ran from an outside line, and a chemical toilet behind a shower curtain. No hot water. A single electric heater that ran off a cable from the main building and tripped the breaker if you ran it above the second setting. Six men slept there. Gheorghe’s partition was the second from the door. He had a mattress on a pallet, a sleeping bag, a rucksack with his clothes, and a phone that he charged at the Spar in town when the bothy’s electrics were down.

He’d been in the UK for eighteen months. Before the peat plant there had been a season picking strawberries in Fife — bending work, the polytunnels thick with heat and the smell of fruit going off. Then six weeks on a mushroom farm in Angus, in sheds where daylight never entered and the air tasted of spore and the foreman spoke to no one by name. The peat plant paid better. Not well — Darren took a cut, the accommodation cost was deducted, the transport from Romania was still being paid off in installments that seemed to shift whenever Gheorghe asked about the balance. But more than the mushrooms. More than the strawberries. Enough to send money.

Alina was four. She lived with Gheorghe’s mother in Craiova in a flat on the fifth floor of a block built in the 1970s. The lift hadn’t worked since before Alina was born. Gheorghe’s mother carried her up and down the stairs. Gheorghe sent three hundred pounds a month when he could. Sometimes two-fifty. Never less than two hundred, which was the amount his mother needed for rent and food and the kindergarten fees. The remainder was Gheorghe’s proof that the arrangement was temporary — that he was here to build something, not just to survive.

On Tuesdays he walked into town to the Spar to buy bread, tinned fish, sometimes a bar of chocolate that he ate on the walk back. The walk took him along the high street, past the charity shops and the shuttered bookmaker and the church hall where the community council met. On those Tuesday evenings, between five and six, he sometimes passed a man in a police uniform walking the other direction — a big man, fifties, walking stiff, knees gone. They were within fifteen feet of each other. They never spoke. There was no reason they would speak. Gheorghe was walking to buy bread. The man was walking to a meeting. The town held them both and kept them apart.

At seventy-five centimetres, the pollen record shows a decline in arboreal species and an increase in Plantago lanceolata, consistent with pastoral land use. The transition is abrupt, suggesting a rapid change in surface conditions.

V

Six months before the body was found, the community council met on the first Tuesday of September in the church hall on John Street. Sixteen people attended. The minutes were taken by Sergeant Rab Duthie, who had volunteered for this task nine years ago because nobody else wanted it and because it gave him something to do with his hands.

Item four on the agenda was local economic development. Donald Petrie stood up. He was wearing the fleece with the logo. He said things were going well at Moss Hill. Demand for horticultural peat was up — the garden centres were buying again after two flat years. He was looking at expansion. Eight new positions.

Councillor Greig, who was seventy-one and had worked in the shipyard offices until the yard closed and now spent his mornings at the bowling club writing letters to the Greenock Telegraph about parking, asked: “Local positions?”

Petrie said: “Whoever applies.”

Nobody asked what “whoever” meant. They knew what it meant the same way they knew what the queue at the methadone pharmacy meant and what the shuttered shopfronts meant and what the container ships passing on the Clyde meant: fluently, automatically, and with the immediate reflex of looking somewhere else. It meant: not local. It meant: from somewhere else. It meant: the kind of workers who arrive through channels that nobody examines because examining them would require asking questions whose answers would make the questioner responsible.

Councillor Greig looked at the table. Petrie’s tone shifted — not dramatically, not in a way you could point to, but the pride in his voice flattened into something more functional.

Rab wrote in the minutes: “Mr. Petrie reported eight new positions at Moss Hill Peat Works.”

He did not record the silence after “whoever applies.” He did not record Councillor Greig’s hand moving across the table surface as if searching for something to hold. He did not record sixteen people simultaneously deciding not to know something they already knew. Minutes are a record of what was said. What was not said has no column on the form.

After the meeting, Rab walked home along the waterfront. The evening was warm for September and the Firth of Clyde was flat and silver-grey, with a container ship moving east toward Glasgow, stacked with boxes in colours that looked cheerful from a distance — red, blue, yellow. The old shipyard cranes stood on the south bank, rust-red against the sky. The yards had employed fifteen thousand men. Now they employed no one. The town knew what it was. It had known for thirty years. It was a place that things passed through on their way somewhere else — ships, money, people. The methadone pharmacy on the high street dispensed at eight AM and there was always a queue, and the queue was made of people the town had made and couldn’t help and wouldn’t look at, and the not-looking had become so practiced it was just the town.

Rab walked past the pharmacy. He walked past the Spar. He walked past the shuttered chip shop beneath his flat. He climbed the stairs, put the kettle on, sat in the chair by the window, and watched the container ship slide east until it disappeared behind the headland.

He did not think about eight new positions. He did not think about the word “whoever.” He thought about the under-12s match on Saturday — whether to start Jamie Bryce on the left or hold him back for the second half — and he thought about his ex-wife, briefly, the way you think about a bruise that has faded but whose location you still remember. Then he thought about nothing. The kettle boiled. He made tea. He drank it. He went to bed.

Outside, the Firth of Clyde moved toward the sea, carrying whatever was in it. A man sleeping in a shipping container and a man sleeping in a flat above a chip shop and a man sleeping in a farmhouse with a fleece hanging on the back of the bedroom door were all just the town, asleep.

At one metre, Sphagnum spore density increases significantly, indicating a return to fully waterlogged bog conditions. Anthropogenic indicators are absent. The peat at this depth predates industrial activity in the region by approximately one hundred and fifty years.

VI

Eight months before the body was found, on a morning in late October, a bus from Glasgow pulled into the town centre and a man got off.

He had a holdall — black nylon, scuffed at the corners, the shoulder strap wrapped twice around his fist. He had a phone with eleven per cent battery. He had a name and a phone number written in biro on a piece of paper folded into the breast pocket of his jacket: Darren, and a mobile number with a London prefix.

He stood on the pavement outside the bus stop and looked at the Firth of Clyde. It was grey and flat and smelled of salt and something underneath the salt — engine oil, maybe, or the residue of industry that was no longer there but had soaked into the waterfront like dye into cloth. The sky was low. A gull sat on a bollard and looked at him.

Gheorghe Balan was twenty-nine. He was from Craiova, which is in the south-west of Romania, in the lowland plain near the Jiu River. His father had driven a delivery truck for a bread company and died of a stroke when Gheorghe was nineteen. His mother worked as a cleaner at the university hospital. His daughter Alina had been born four years ago and lived with his mother because Gheorghe’s ex-partner had moved to Timișoara and did not send money. Gheorghe had completed secondary school and one year of engineering studies at the university before dropping out to work. He could fix most things. Engines, plumbing, electrics. He had good hands — large, careful, patient.

He had been in the UK for a year and two months. He had come on a flight from Bucharest to Luton and a coach from Luton to a farm in Fife where he picked strawberries for four months. Then Angus — the mushroom farm, the sheds without daylight. Then a phone call from a man he’d met in Fife who knew a man in London who knew a man named Darren who said there was steadier work, better money, up in Scotland. Gheorghe hadn’t asked what kind of work. Work was work. The distinction between types of work was a luxury for people who had more than one option.

The address Darren had given him was a pub called The Customs House, which was on the waterfront, which was not the customs house. The actual customs house had been demolished in the 1970s. The pub had inherited the name through proximity and laziness and the tendency of places to keep calling themselves what they were called even after the reason has gone.

Gheorghe walked. The town did not notice him. The charity shops were not yet open. A woman walked a small white dog past the church. A van was parked outside the Spar with its hazard lights on. The town was doing its morning, which was not about him, which had nothing to do with him, which would continue in exactly this manner whether he was here or not.

The Customs House was on the corner of the waterfront road and a lane that led down to the old pier. The sign above the door was painted dark green with gold lettering, the gold flaking at the edges. He pushed the door open. Inside: a bar running the length of the left wall, six tables, a television mounted in the corner showing horse racing with the sound off, a fruit machine blinking in the far corner. The air smelled of last night’s beer and this morning’s bleach and underneath both the permanent smell of the building itself — damp stone, old wood.

The barmaid was reading a paperback propped against the lager taps. She was in her forties, with dark hair pulled back, and she looked up when he came in and looked down again when it was clear he wasn’t trouble. It took less than two seconds.

“Tea, please,” Gheorghe said.

She put the kettle on. She didn’t ask what kind of tea because there was one kind of tea and it came in bags from a box under the counter. She put the bag in a white mug and poured the water and set it in front of him with a small jug of milk. He paid with a two-pound coin.

He sat at a table near the window. The window looked out onto the waterfront. The Firth of Clyde was still grey and still flat and the gull had moved from the bollard to the railing. On the television, horses ran in a silent field. The barmaid turned a page.

Gheorghe held the mug in both hands and felt the heat come through the ceramic. He would wait for Darren, who would arrive in twenty minutes and shake his hand and call him George because Gheorghe was too many syllables for the kind of exchange Darren conducted. Darren would explain the work — peat, cutting, a place called Moss Hill — and the accommodation, and the pay, and the deductions, and Gheorghe would nod because nodding was the vocabulary of the arrangement, the only available grammar. And then the machine would begin its work, which was not dramatic, not violent, not sudden, but ordinary and slow and made of days and forms and silences and nods and a tushkar in a man’s hand and a mug of tea and the town doing its morning, which had nothing to do with him, which was not about him, which would continue.

Outside the window, the Clyde moved toward the sea. A woman hung washing on a line in a garden across the road. The town was doing its morning. Gheorghe Balan was alive and sitting in a pub and holding a cup of tea, and no one in the town would remember this morning, and no one in the town was required to.