The Ghost Fields (Ruth Galloway) (40 page)

‘It probably was that too,’ says Ruth. ‘Hazel was involved with the henge dig, all those years ago. I think he did feel strongly about the land. I do remember, though, at the Bronze Age dig, Hazel refused to have his DNA tested. He said he didn’t believe in participating in scientific studies.’

‘Obviously scared that his Blackstock DNA would show up,’ says Nelson. ‘Like it did with Cloughie.’

‘There’s a lot of it about,’ says Young George. It’s impossible to tell whether he thinks that this is a good thing or not.

‘It was me who told Hazel about the plane in Devil’s Hollow,’ says Chaz. ‘Cassie and I used to play there as children and we found all these engine parts.’

Nelson remembers Chaz’s conversation with Barry West, the digger driver. He obviously knew, or guessed, that a Second World War plane was buried in the field. Did he really have nothing to do with moving Fred’s body into the cockpit? Was that all Hazel’s work? Is Chaz really as innocent – or stupid – as he seems? On balance, Nelson thinks he probably is. Chaz and his father like the quiet life. Cassie is the one who enjoys being centre stage, heaven help Clough.

Ruth, who has also been looking at Chaz, says suddenly, ‘You followed me. You followed me home to the Saltmarsh one night.’

‘You never told me about that,’ says Nelson.

‘It wasn’t a big deal,’ says Ruth. ‘But I recognised Chaz’s car when he drove Judy to the hospital yesterday.’

Chaz looks uncomfortable. ‘That was Hazel’s idea. He thought that we should keep an eye on you. He said that you were the key to stopping the building work because you had all the archaeological knowledge. But now I realise that he must have been terrified when he heard that you were digging in the pet’s graveyard. Grandpa told him that you lived on the edge of the Saltmarsh. Hazel wanted to see the place for himself.’

‘He wanted to know where you lived so he could come and kill you later,’ says Nelson. ‘He attacked Cassie. He would have attacked you without a thought. You should have told me, Ruth.’ Sometimes he thinks that worrying over two families will be the death of him. Why can’t he protect them both all the time?

Ruth says nothing. Nelson can’t tell if she’s annoyed or not.

‘We’ll have to take statements from all of you,’ he says. ‘It seems that a lot of trouble could have been avoided if only you’d all been straight with each other.’

But, deep down, he knows that this isn’t the way families work. Secrets are passed down through the generations, in the same way that DNA is shared by different people in different variations over hundreds and thousands of years.

‘We’d better get back to the station,’ says Nelson. ‘There’s a lot of work still to do. Ruth, you need to get back to Katie.’

‘How are you going to get there?’ asks Young George. ‘The flooding’s as bad as ever.’

Tim speaks for the first time. He has been very quiet ever since the shooting.

‘All aboard the giant duck,’ he says now with a smile.

CHAPTER 38

‘Do you think he’ll enjoy it?’ says Kate.

‘I’m sure he will,’ says Ruth.

They both look at Blue Bear, who is sitting at the kitchen table with them. Kate has been given the honour of entertaining Blue Bear for the Christmas holidays. She is delighted but rather overwhelmed by the responsibility. Ruth, too, feels rather daunted by the pressure to show Blue Bear a good time. So far Nelson has taken him and Kate to see Father Christmas in Castle Mall and Frank has taken them to the pantomime in King’s Lynn. Kate has written up these adventures in large wavering crayon and has drawn accompanying pictures. ‘We saw Snoo Wit and her doors. It was Fun.’ It has all taken far more time than Ruth’s holiday marking.

Today, they are going to a nativity play at the pig farm. Kate is worried whether Blue Bear will find it entertaining enough and Ruth has her own reasons for feeling apprehensive about the outing. But Cassie, who has gone into partnership with Chaz, in charge of ‘marketing and publicity’, is keen to use the farm for community events. There was, of course, some rather unwelcome publicity surrounding Hazel’s arrest for murder and Cassie wants to counterbalance this by linking the Blackstock name to something rather more wholesome. Old George’s death from a heart attack passed almost unnoticed in the papers. Nelson didn’t feel that it was worth publicising the old man’s confession, so the man who killed his brother, aged eighteen, and assumed his inheritance is remembered in the obituaries as ‘a loving father and grandfather who enjoyed nothing better than spending time on his country estate’. Well, he was a loving father to Hazel, even if he was distinctly lukewarm about his legitimate son. And he certainly enjoyed his country estate, having gone to the trouble of killing to secure it for himself.

But both Ruth and Sally felt that Nell deserved to know the truth about her father’s death. So, about a week after Hazel’s arrest, when the flood waters had dwindled to solitary lakes in the middle of fields, they took Nell for a walk in the grounds of Blackstock Hall. In Devil’s Hollow, building work was beginning again. Edward Spens’s half-finished houses had been completely submerged by the floods. However, this did not seem to have changed his mind about the wisdom of building on flood plains. The workmen were busy putting up scaffolding and draining away water.

Sally led the way past the hollow and through the trees. The high tides had pushed the beach stones up into the adjoining fields. Ruth, Sally and Nell sat on a newly created shingle bar and Ruth told Nell the story related to her in the middle of the night by Old George.

Nell’s eyes had filled with tears. ‘Poor Daddy. To be killed like that when he’d survived the crash. But I suppose he wouldn’t have known anything about it.’

‘No,’ says Ruth. ‘George said that it happened very quickly.’ Fred had hardly finished his opening sentence when his brother had shot him in the head. The only thing you can say about such a death is that it was quick.

‘And he’d be pleased that you came to Blackstock Hall,’ says Sally, ‘and got to know us all.’

Would Fred have been pleased? He had moved halfway round the world to get away from his mother’s cursed landscape; would he be pleased that Nell and Blake are now planning to spend part of every year in Norfolk? Who knows, but families have a funny way of repeating themselves. Sally and Young George have even bought themselves a Jack Russell puppy and called it Bingo.

‘I’m certainly pleased I’ve met you, Sally,’ says Nell, putting out her hand to the other woman. Ruth thinks of Frank saying, ‘The women in that family are worth ten of the men.’ He had a point, she thinks.

Two days after this conversation, Ruth visited Blackstock Hall to watch the episode of
The History Men
entitled ‘The Ghost Fields’. She had once sworn that she would never enter the house again, but it looked very different from the moated grange where she’d had to flee for her life and been saved by two men and a duck. The fields were still boggy and wet but the house itself looked better than she had ever seen it. Maybe it was the removal of Old George’s baleful influence, maybe it was just because Sally had decorated the place for Christmas. But sitting in the drawing room, with a vast Christmas tree twinkling away in the corner, it was hard to think that this was the room where a villainous old murderer had breathed his last. Nell and Blake were there, as well as Cassie and Clough. Frank came too – he was the only representative of the production company now that Paul and Earl had gone back to the States. The whole event had quite a party atmosphere.

The first shot of the airfield made Ruth catch her breath. Steve, the director of photography, really knew his stuff. The vast empty fields, the sky above, the geese making their way out to sea, it was all so stark and beautiful that it barely needed words. But there was Frank, smiling into the camera, talking about 444th Bomb Group and – oh God – there was Ruth in her best jacket describing the discovery of the plane. Ruth shut her eyes and only opened them again when Nell, in her long grey coat, was walking through the orchard at Blackstock Hall.

‘I never really knew my dad,’ she was saying, ‘but here I can feel him all around me. These are the fields where he walked as a boy, where he played cricket with his brothers, where he taught his dog to hunt rabbits. In the local church he carved his initials on the pew, and it’s where, a few days ago, we laid him to rest in the graveyard. Dad belonged to New England but he belonged here too. To Old England, if you like.’

And the orchard is the place where he died, thought Ruth. Shot by one of the brothers with whom he’d played cricket. But she was glad that they had made the programme, glad that Fred had this memorial as well as the one in the graveyard. And she was very glad that, apart from a brief sighting in his purple robe at the funeral, Hazel did not appear in the film.

Hazel admitted to the murder of Patrick Blackstock and the attempted murders of Cassandra Blackstock and David Clough. He was charged under his real name of George Buggins. Cathbad, on a high after the birth of his daughter, had the grace to be rather embarrassed about the fact that his peaceful druid friend turned out to be a murderer. ‘I could sense an angry energy in him,’ he said, ‘but I thought that was to do with the land, with the development and everything.’ ‘Trust Cathbad,’ said Nelson. ‘He always has to have the last word.’ As for Ruth, she feels that her faith in Cathbad has been rather shaken by his inability to predict both his daughter’s birth date and his friend’s homicidal tendencies. She’s rather relieved about this, to be honest. It’s not safe to endow another mortal with too many powers.

Now Ruth straps Kate and Blue Bear into their car seats. She has a new car because her old Renault did not survive its immersion in the flood waters. This is a Renault too, but cars have changed over the last fifteen years. They are rounded and sleek, whereas her old car was friendly and square. The dashboard is a bewildering array of retro dials. She has air conditioning and a CD player. Nelson is delighted that she is driving something with proper airbags and Kate loves the car, which she calls Pascal, after a French boy in her class. Ruth tries not to miss her old car too much.

Ruth puts Pascal into gear and they move away smoothly. They are meeting Frank at the farm. He’s due to fly back to Seattle tomorrow, where he is spending Christmas with his children. Nothing more has been said about the prospect of him coming back to England and living in Cambridge. Ruth and Kate are going to her parents in Eltham for Christmas. Ruth hopes that Blue Bear will approve. She has a feeling that there will be rather too much churchgoing for his taste. She has him down as a rather free-thinking bear.

They sing Christmas songs all the way. Kate’s primary school, being determinedly secular, did not put on a nativity play but they did present a Christmas entertainment of such all-embracing sweetness that Ruth cried all the way through. The story was rather confused, featuring, as it did, a range of animals and fairy-tale characters, Father Christmas, Old King Cole and Babushka. Kate, in a green sleeping bag, was a caterpillar. Her big number was ‘Caterpillars Only Crawl’ and they sing it now, bowling along through the frosty fields. The flood has left its mark on the countryside and you can still see fence posts and trees sticking up out of what appear to be lakes. But it’s a beautiful winter day with a pale gold sun shining on the sparkly expanses of water. It’s hard to see the landscape as doomed on a day like this.

The pig farm too is looking its best. There are Christmas lights draped across the control tower and an inflatable Santa wobbles madly in the field where the planes landed and took off. They follow the old runway to the barn where the entertainment is to take place. There are so many cars parked there already that they have to walk quite a bit of the way.

‘Blue Bear doesn’t like walking,’ says Kate.

‘We’re nearly there,’ says Ruth.

As Ruth and Kate approach the barn, they see a several men with tea towels on their heads and – to Kate’s delight – an actual donkey. Cassie is obviously going for realism in a big way. They also see Clough, his arms full of holly.

‘Pity it’s not mistletoe,’ he says, kissing Ruth. ‘Hallo, sweetheart,’ he says to Kate. ‘Looking forward to Christmas?’

‘What’s the donkey called?’ says Kate.

‘He’s called Carrots,’ says Clough. ‘Want to say hallo?’

He takes Kate by the hand and leads her over to pay homage to Carrots. It’s odd seeing Clough so at home on Blackstock territory. But then, according to his DNA, he is a Blackstock, somewhere in the distant past. There’s no doubt though that he has become one of the family. Sally and George are even talking about moving to a smaller house and leaving the Hall to Cassie and Clough. Clough as lord of the manor. Ruth wonders what Nelson would say. Well, she’s going to see him today. He said that he was coming. She can’t help scanning the field for his car.