Green and Pleasant Land Read online

  He picked up a family-size address book and found a page. ‘There you are. Fratello. Anna Fratello. Bury St Edmunds.’ Then he headed out of the room. ‘I’m supposed to move around every few minutes,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘And there’s all that tea …’

  Robyn jotted before Mrs Garbutt could gather breath to stop her. With a smile, she replaced the book on top of the bureau. But she didn’t sit down, catching Fran’s eye.

  What? Did Robyn want to end the interview? Just as it was getting interesting? Fran stayed put, but made a show of gathering herself together as if she was going to follow Robyn’s lead.

  ‘There are just a couple more things,’ Robyn said, ‘if you don’t mind my asking. How did you feel when Phil employed a private detective to help find Natalie?’

  Mrs Garbutt shot to her feet, white to the lips with fury. She made a visible effort to appear calm. ‘Well, you do surprise me. Well, if you’re telling the truth and he did, I suppose he thought he and his money could achieve more than a whole force of policemen out all hours and in all weathers. Well, he couldn’t, could he?’

  All that anger: it almost looked personal. She felt sorry for Robyn, now raising her hands pacifically.

  Fran decided to draw fire to herself by asking a really tendentious question. ‘Forgive me asking, but it really is my last question: sometimes when people lose loved ones, they find legal closure by having them declared dead. Did you or even Philip ever contemplate that?’

  Her reward was a hard stare. ‘I know she’s gone. Why should I need a piece of paper? As for Philip, who knows? We’ve not seen hide nor hair of him in over nineteen years – not that we expected to, and certainly not that we wanted to.’

  Fran nodded. ‘Yes, I quite understand. I know these questions have been intrusive, and I’m sure you’ll be glad to see the back of us. Are there any questions you want to ask us? We’ll do our best to answer.’

  ‘Only the obvious one: why should you start to dredge through this all over again? After all this time?’

  Fran shook her head. ‘It was a management decision, Mrs Garbutt. We’re just doing what we’re told.’ That was what the Nazis said, of course. A supine response. But at least it was an honest one. ‘As for me, as Robyn told you, I’m just a hired hand.’

  ‘We want to sort everything out and leave you in peace as quickly as we can,’ Robyn said earnestly. ‘Should we get that box now, Mrs Garbutt? We don’t want your husband slipping a disc trying to lift anything heavy.’

  ‘When you’ve got it you’d best be off. The roads like this you’ll want to tackle them while there’s a scrap of daylight left.’

  Robyn drove tight-lipped as the wind buffeted the car, first one way then another. She might have slowed down to cut through standing water but other drivers weren’t so considerate – or indeed sensible – and sent car-wash-size drenches of water over them. The wipers slapped relentlessly, unless the wind lifted them and rendered them momentarily useless.

  ‘On a scale of one to ten,’ Fran asked, ‘how happy would you think our enquiries are making the Garbutts?’

  ‘I’d put it on the minus scale. It’s sort of like picking the scab off a half-healed wound – but you’d think they’d want to know the truth after all this time. Like you said, to get closure.’

  ‘Can you think of any reason why they don’t want us sniffing around again?’

  ‘I’ve never met any response like it before. You don’t think – you don’t think they had anything to do with their own daughter’s death? It was clear they had a very … uncomfortable … relationship with her.’

  ‘Quite. I’m dead sure they’re concealing something. Maybe a lot. Not that I think for a single second that they harmed her in any way. Just that – my God!’

  Before their eyes a high-laden lorry tilted slowly and inexorably to one side and finally tipped over. Enough of theorizing about the past: it was time to leap into immediate action. Robyn made the emergency service calls, crisp with authority. Fran, unable to reach the cab, let alone get to the driver, took it on herself to flag down traffic. There was nothing else she could do. And once the place swarmed with police vehicles, ambulances and fire service vehicles, she wasn’t required to do even that. All those years when she’d have been a welcome, useful part of a team trying to save a living man and now she was reduced to digging up the past.

  Even in the comparative shelter of the car park, she had to hang on the tailgate while Robyn wrestled the Garbutts’ box from the boot. They carried it between them, trudging watery prints through Iris’s precious entrance hall and up the stairs. They were still dripping when they dropped it on the incident room table.

  ‘I thought I might skip off now, if it’s all the same to you,’ Robyn said, pushing her fringe out of her eyes. ‘When Traffic have debriefed me, of course.’

  ‘No problem. This can wait till tomorrow,’ Fran declared, trying not to sound regretful. ‘I won’t look at the goodies you worked so hard to get hold of. Not till you’re here. Off you go – and have a nice hot bath as soon as you can. Oh, before you go, let me have Anna Fratello’s address: I’ll see if I can find a phone number for her.’

  ‘Oh, I can do that!’

  ‘You’re dithering. Go and talk to Traffic and take yourself home.’

  They walked down the corridor together. Fran had always prided herself on being as tough as old boots, but she was out of practice at standing round in soaking clothes, and was going, she told Robyn, to spend a few minutes in the company of the hand dryer. But she couldn’t direct it up to her hair or down to her legs, so she gave up, returning to the incident room. She was in time to see Robyn letting herself in again. It was only as she bustled in after her she realized she really should have watched her, to see what she was up to. Spied on one of her team, in other words. But it was too late now.

  ‘You’re still dripping!’ she sang out.

  Robyn wheeled round. ‘Traffic aren’t quite ready for me. Another ten minutes, they said. So I just thought – Anna’s number. I’d have a look. Oh, sod it.’ She checked the incoming text. ‘Now they’re saying tomorrow. So I might as well push off, if you’re sure it’s OK.’

  ‘Off you go, Robyn. I promise I won’t look in the box. Go on. I’ll get Fratello’s number.’ She added in a mock-quavering voice, ‘If I can remember how to use the phone book …’ If Anna was ex-directory, though she might no longer be entitled to ask favours of local police forces, she’d bet her pension she’d get more action more quickly than even the willing and efficient Robyn would.

  She could almost see the young man she spoke to, DS Tony Woolmer, stand to attention as he promised to go round personally and have a word with the lady. One day she’d ask him what a man from West Yorkshire was doing down in Suffolk.

  TWELVE

  Standing in driving rain having a conversation – a more user-friendly, if less accurate term than confrontation – was hardly the best way to start an evening out. But Fran had things to say to the ACC, Colin Webster, and the more uncomfortable they all were the shorter the encounter was likely to be. She also manoeuvred him so that the rain was to their backs and thus straight into his face. She told him, though in slightly more polite terms, that communications left a great deal to be desired and that if he wished to scupper any chances of cooperation with the Garbutts, invading their privacy three times in less than twenty-four hours was a really good way to do it.

  The weather must have agreed. While the umbrella she and Mark were clutching propelled them forcibly towards Webster, his simply blew inside out, and then took off towards North Wales. He set off in pursuit. Mark, tennis fit, got to it first. He took the chance to tell Webster, too puffed to argue, that he and Fran had had to leave the cottage, but he himself was rendered speechless by the ACC’s angry riposte: ‘I told you, you shouldn’t have been wasting money like that in the first place. You should have been instructed to use the accommodation block.’

  By then Fran had joined them. ‘We
’re too old to do Spartan,’ she declared cheerfully, with the smile that had closed a thousand conversations. One day she’d have a lot of questions for the little drowned rat to answer, but it wasn’t just her who was too old to hang around in dripping wet clothes.

  At least they could text Hugh to tell him they’d be late. A return text told them they’d be wiser to abandon the evening. Hugh was up to his axles in a flood near to his home, and would be glad to have an excuse to turn round and put his feet up. He was free for Sunday lunch, weather – and surface water – permitting.

  Relief outweighing disappointment, Fran drove carefully to their B and B, deep puddles nearly but not quite meeting in the middle of the road. Did they constitute floods? If not, the lakes engulfing the fields either side of them, glimmering in the fitful moonlight, certainly did. At times the water in the fields actually seemed higher than the road: what invisible meniscus held it back from inundating it and sweeping away even their heavy car? How difficult it was not simply to accelerate as hard as she could to get away from danger – but who knew what might be waiting for them round the next bend? And engraved on her heart was the police-driver training dictum: if you don’t know what you’re driving into – don’t drive into it.

  To their surprise Edwina Lally was waiting to greet them when they got back. ‘My meeting was cancelled,’ she said, scooping up their coats as they parked brolly and boots in her porch. ‘And suspecting yours might be too, I slipped into Checketts in the village just before they closed and bought in some supplies. I’ve kept the receipts so when I charge you what I paid you can see I’m not diddling you.’

  ‘Edwina, if you charged us quintuple, it’d be worth it not to have to go out again tonight. But are you sure you’re safe here? There’s a lot of water around.’

  ‘Safe as an ark. It’s never once flooded all the years I’ve been here. And just for my peace of mind, they said, though I suspect it’s more to do with theirs, the flood warden and a couple of hefty lads from the rugby club came round a couple of days ago. They checked the floodgate upstream was closed, and just for good measure they’ve been busy with sandbags too. The back of the house looks like a gun-emplacement.’

  ‘As I see it,’ Fran began, fresh from a hot shower with all the luxury of Edwina’s pampering unguents, ‘we may need Ted, quirks and all, to push this through quickly. We know how to manage quirks – we’ve dealt with enough oddballs between us. At the very least we can use him to filter people like Bethan Carter, from whom I got nothing to justify the time I spent with her.’ She sat down, taking a sip from a wonderfully strong G and T.

  ‘Nothing?’ Mark pulled back from the log fire, which he’d taken it upon himself to cherish.

  ‘I got a distinct sense that she was economical with the truth on a number of occasions. She dropped out that Natalie was once sporty, but then quickly implied she wasn’t. We need to check, don’t we? She also kept trying to drift me off course – can we turn any of those into something? Or did you fare any better?’

  ‘I might have been trying to pin down a jelly. But I did suspect that she might be shielding one of the investigating officers – someone senior in those days. And, though I’m probably misjudging her, I suspected she had a thing for, if not a fling with, Phil Foreman.’

  ‘She told me he was too busy working to organize a funeral.’

  ‘Bloody hell. Perhaps I was wrong about her and Foreman. You know, I have a terrible fear that she wants to come back to talk to me some more. About nothing. Thanks ever so for dropping me in it, sweetheart.’ He leaned across and kissed her.

  ‘That might be a job for Ted, then. He probably knows enough about whoever was on the case to work out who she was protecting. Actually, Iris might have some info too. If Bethan knows about Iris’s new knee, you can bet your life Iris knows about Bethan’s old liaisons. And her new ones. Sorry, that’s not very sisterly of me. Did you know she wants to do a piece on us?’

  ‘I gathered as much. And I made it absolutely plain that if she printed anything at all about us and our activities before we were ready to talk, then she’d get nothing. Are we singing from the same hymn-sheet? Heavens, I hope it’s not a strict Baptist one – this drink’s gone straight to my head. Didn’t get much time for lunch, thanks to Bethan. But I did have time to call Gerry Barnes.’ He broke off as Edwina came into the room to tell them their starter was on the table. ‘To cut a long story short,’ he said, ‘we’re eating with Gerry tomorrow evening.’

  Edwina was inclined to chat between courses, and didn’t need much urging to join them in a glass or two of wine.

  It turned out that she was an actor – ‘resting, darlings’ – who’d never found roles easy to come by, and hadn’t minded settling down when she’d married. Bored was a word she didn’t permit in her vocabulary, so she’d thrown herself into the life of the local community. She’d sung in all the local amateur operatic companies, made costumes for the WI, organized talent contests and generally kept herself occupied – what else could one do, she demanded, opening another bottle, ‘when one’s husband’s cantering round the world trying to sell sand to Eskimos, or whatever? Oh, but Wally was a lovely man. Every girl’s dream: handsome, kind and a very good provider.’

  ‘So you never returned to the professional stage?’

  ‘Too busy. And now I’ve got time on my hands the dear Dames have cornered the market for older character actors. Bear with me.’ She returned to the room a few minutes later with a pile of scrapbooks. ‘Darlings, I only do this when I’m a touch tiddled and sentimental. Just tell me when you’re bored. Two snores apiece and I shall know I have to stop.’

  Striking now, with her chignon of snow-white hair, in her dark-haired younger days Edwina had been a beauty; the portraits might have been by the likes of Angus McBean, but the photographers had good material to work with. And presumably she’d been earning enough once (unless Wally had chipped in) to command the fee the top photographic artists of a generation could demand. They oohed and aahed their way through her professional days, but she seemed just as keen to riffle through her more recent memories.

  ‘Now these are when the local schools discovered Drama and Theatre Arts A level: it wasn’t just end of term plays, it was proper acting training.’ There were pages of young people miming, dancing, making each other up. ‘Now here’s an end of term production I was very proud of: look. The Crucible. Or this one – As You Like It.’

  Mark was relaxing into the sort of pleasant torpor he rarely, as a driver, enjoyed: as if on a self-denying ordinance, he usually stayed below the limit even when it was Fran’s turn at the wheel. He hardly bothered to look at the endless images, mostly shot with no regard for lighting or focus, let alone composition. And he had absolutely no interest in the young people Fran feigned so much enthusiasm for. But there was something different about the two more recent ensemble snaps.

  ‘Who’s your fair Rosalind?’ he roused himself enough to ask. They’d seen As You Like It the previous summer in a low budget open air production in the grounds of St Augustine’s Abbey. A performance plagued by wasps, as he recalled.

  ‘Not to mention Abigail Williams?’ Fran was far more interested. And he didn’t even know she knew the Miller play.

  ‘She was one of my best actors. No hint of stage fright, and a real stage presence. I knew she’d go far – my dears, forgive a gruesome joke from an old woman – but not as far as people imagine she must have gone. The undiscover’d country from whose bourn No traveller returns. Poor Natalie.

  There was no need for Fran to kick his ankle; he was fully alert now. ‘This is Natalie Garbutt?’

  ‘Yes.’ She swigged more wine. ‘When they found those remains yesterday, they raised a lot of hope. Sad hopes. One auspicious and one dropping eye. And now they say they’re not hers. Roman or Saxon or something.’ She sounded personally aggrieved.

  Fran put a hand on Edwina’s. ‘I’d really like you to talk about Natalie. But before you say a word, I want y
ou to understand exactly why we’re interested.’

  ‘You said something about visiting the police here. Not assisting with their enquiries?’

  ‘Not in that sense. Assisting them in making enquiries, more like. They’ve reopened the Natalie Foreman case. They asked us to help. Fresh pairs of eyes.’ She was speaking with the sort of abrupt clarity needed for someone old and deaf. Or drunk.

  ‘Batman and Robin. No: you’re both too tall for that. And I’d be hard put to tell which was boss and which sidekick. Superman and Superwoman.’ She clapped her hands and spread them wide as if bidding them join her on some imaginary stage. ‘Now, contrary to what you may believe, I really am compos mentis and happy to tell you about the lovely girl. What do you need to know?’

  ‘Paint a picture for us,’ Mark said with that seductive smile of his.

  ‘I think she was more admired than loved – like that wretched girl of Wordsworth’s. No, I’ve got it the wrong way round, haven’t I? A maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love. My apologies. She was, as you can see, born to play Rosalind: tall and lovely, with a decidedly androgynous air. To be honest, I always thought she might be gay. Certainly shoals of younger girls had crushes on her. The lead actress, the house captain, the tennis captain, the hockey captain: she was an icon for those lower down the school. But she dated the most attractive young men in the area and obviously made what my mother would have called a very good match with her footballer. Except match it was not. Oh, perhaps I exaggerate. I couldn’t have had higher hopes for Natalie had she been my own child – grandchild, perhaps.’ She sipped absently at the empty glass. After a moment’s silent discussion with Fran, Mark poured in half an inch, measured almost by the eye-dropperful. Fran shook her head, waving her hand over her still unfinished drink.

  ‘Marriage apart, what did you make of her career choices?’ Mark asked.