That way things get done. I expect this woman is very efficient and managing.”
It was DS Barry Vine who had talked to Jonathan Pickford's mother and was told her son and his girlfriend both worked in banking and commuted by train to London each day. He was twenty-nine and she was thirty. Both of them had been at university eleven years before and had only lived in this house since Brenda and her husband had converted it into two flats four years ago.
“But you and your husband were here eleven years ago?”
“We've been here since we were married.” She took him into the living room of their ground-floor flat and showed him from a window Grimble's Field next door and the boarded-up derelict bungalow. This morning, because it had rained most of the night, the land looked particularly green and lush, the bungalow half-hidden among the trees, the only incongruous note the crime tape, enclosing the area where the body had been found. “When old Mr. Grimble was alive,” she said, “he had such a lovely garden. And he went on working in it, keeping it immaculate until a week before he died. His lawn hadn't got a weed in it. Over by our fence he grew his vegetables and had his kitchen garden, and on the other side, near the Tredowns, he had his fruit trees. I remember how he used to give us Cox's apples and Bramleys. For cooking, you know.” She peered into Barry's face, in case perhaps he had never heard of an apple pie. “The trees are still there, of course, but John Grimble's never pruned them, never done a thing, so of course they don't bear. Isn't it a shame?”
“If you can cast your mind back eleven years, Mrs. Pickford, precisely eleven years to June, can you remember anything unusual happening on that land? Anything at all, it doesn't matter how small.”
She seemed rather a timid woman. Suspicious too. It was as if she feared he was trying to catch her out in some misdemeanor. “Ought I to remember? What kind of thing do you mean?”
That, obviously, he couldn't tell her. She was a woman who might easily have ideas put into her head. He looked patiently into the broad pale face, powdered and clumsily blotched with pink. She wasn't carrying excessive weight but seemed tightly corseted and was rather breathless. She laid one heavily ringed hand against her upper chest as if to quieten a threatened gasping. “There were the farmworkers. My husband called them itinerant workers. They come at fruit-picking time in trailers, you know, and one year they camped on Mr. Grimble's field and made an awful mess. Is that the kind of thing you mean?”
“It might be,” he said cautiously. “Do you remember which year that was?”
“Maybe ten years. Could have been eleven.”
That was better. “What time of the year would it have been?”
She looked at him helplessly. “Well, it was always June or September they came. June for the strawberries, and autumn for the apples and pears.”
Barry persisted. “Which was it that year? Can you remember?”
And she did, her already pink face flushing with the effort. “Old Mr. Grimble, Mr. Arthur Grimble, he was dead by then. He'd died in the winter. His son never did a thing to that garden, but all the roses were in bloom just the same. And when the fruit-pickers camped there in their trailers-they used to hang their washing on the trees, that wasn't very nice-where was I? Oh, yes, when they camped there Mr. Grimble, young Mr. Grimble that is, he came and drove them off with sticks. Well, they looked like guns to me, but my husband said they were sticks.”
“That was before the trench was dug, was it?
“Yes, it must have been. That's why Mr. Grimble and his friend came over, that's how they knew the workers were there. Mr. Grimble told my husband they meant to survey the land for where the main drains should go and what did they find but all those people camping. I don't mind telling you I never cared much for Mr. Grimble, but when it came to trespassing I was completely on his side.”
“All that is very helpful, Mrs. Pickford. Perhaps you could tell me if you remember anyone-a man-disappearing around here about that time.” The word alarmed her, he could see, and he modified it. “Well, going away. Someone you know who went away and you didn't see them again.”
“Oh, no. I'd have said. When you asked me if I remembered anything unusual happening I'd have said. That would be very un-usual, wouldn't it?”
The Hunters next door looked old enough to be Brenda Pickford's parents, and she, as Barry said to himself, was no spring chicken. The front door was opened to him by a carer. He found the ancient pair sitting opposite each other before a fireplace, in which there was a vase of dried flowers instead of a fire. Barry thought there was something pathetic about their placing themselves in that particular spot, out of habit presumably, because all their lives until recently it had been normal practice to sit in front of an open fire. Pathetic perhaps but not tragic, for the room was insufferably hot by his standards, yet both of them, shrunken and wasted, were wrapped in layers of cardigans, scarves, and shawls, the old man as much as his wife. Audrey Hunter's eyes were shut and Barry would have thought her asleep but for the hand in her lap that moved and trembled, describing figures of eight on the blanket that covered her knees. Her husband's eyes were a watery sky blue, artless, innocent, and uncomprehending.
“He's ninety-six and she's ninety-three,” said the woman. “You needn't look like that. They're deaf, they can't hear you.” She bellowed into Mr. Hunter's ear, “Here's a policeman come to ask you about Old Grimble's Field.”
“What's that?” the old man muttered as Barry had known he would. Eventually, the question having been shouted twice more, he said, “Eleven years? I was only eighty-five then. I could get about then.”
His wife continued doodling invisible shapes on her lap. She opened her eyes, put her free hand out to the carer, and whispered, “What's happening?”
“Nothing, sweetheart,” said the carer. “Nothing for you to worry about.” To Barry she said in a more peremptory tone, “You won't get anything out of them, you know.”
He persisted for a little longer but in vain.
“What did I tell you?” The woman was triumphant as she showed him to the front door.
He got into his car. The interview had rather shaken him. Wexford had been overoptimistic about the Hunters. Inevitably, Barry thought of modern medicine and healthier lifestyles keeping everyone alive much longer so that by the time he reached retirement age there wouldn't be thousands but tens, hundreds, of thousands of people like the Hunters. Alive but not living, ancient and disabled by time, deprived by the years of memory, hearing, sight, and most movement but still alive. He, too, maybe one day. The carer, when she told him he needn't look like that, must have referred to his expression of pity mixed with horror.
Hannah and Lyn went to the canteen for lunch, Lyn forcing herself to choose the spring salad and trying to keep her eyes from Hannah's ham and cheese pancakes with sauteed potatoes. On the other side of the room, alone at a table, Hannah had spotted PS Peach of the uniformed branch. Peach had taken what he called “a shine to” Hannah. He meant he had fallen in love with her, as he truly had, but to say so aloud would sound too serious and emotional for him even to dream of. Once, a few months back, he had declared himself in a way few men do these days, by telling her he liked her and wanted to take her out with him with engagement in view. Hannah thought he must be the only officer in Kingsmarkham police station who didn't know about her and Bal Bhattacharya. She told him and he was visibly upset. Since then, if he hadn't avoided her, he had kept his distance. Just the same, “I don't want to catch his eye,” Hannah said to Lyn.
So it was much to the surprise of both girls when they saw him on his feet and heading their way, plate in one hand and glass of Coke in the other. A blush suffused his face as he approached, but he asked coolly enough if he might join them. Only the very rude and brutish ever say no to this request. Hannah said, “Of course,” and Lyn said, “You're welcome, Peachy. Sit down.”
Peach must have had at least one given name but no one knew what it was. He was always called Peachy, even by Wexford, and the name wasn't inappropriate, bestowed as it was on a man with plump pink cheeks and fair hair.
“I don't want to intrude,” he said, pausing to allow both women to demur, “but I've not come over just because I was-well, wanting company or anything like that.” He looked at Hannah and quickly looked away. “I've got something to tell you about this case. I mean, the body in Grimble's Field. Well, not tell you about it, tell you what I've done.”
“What you've done, Peachy?” said Hannah.
“What I've made, rather. It's this missing persons thing. We've got records going back only eight years, right?”
