The Ghost Fields (Ruth Galloway) (4 page)

As they follow Mrs Blackstock down a seemingly endless corridor, Nelson can’t help but agree with her assessment. All the rooms in the house, though undoubtedly large and well-proportioned, are either empty or full of boxes. It’s hard to imagine the place being transformed into a haven of breakfast tables and comfortable sofas. Eventually, though, Sally turns a corner and admits them to a large kitchen complete with Aga, armchairs and an open fire.

‘We practically live in this room, I’m afraid,’ she says when Nelson comments on the fire. ‘The rest of the house is just too bloody cold. Now, what’s all this about?’

The sudden switch from Barbara Good to Margaret Thatcher takes Nelson by surprise, as does the gear change into an extremely patrician accent. He says, aware that he is sounding like a stage policeman, ‘We’ve got some news regarding a gentleman whom we believe may be a family member. Frederick J. Blackstock.’

Sally Blackstock’s mouth forms a small round ‘o’. ‘Fred?’ she says. ‘Freddy? But he died in the war. His plane went down over the sea.’

‘Mrs Blackstock, do you remember reading in the local press about a Second World War plane being found near here? It would have been a couple of months back, in July.’

‘Yes, I think I remember something.’

‘Well, there was a body in the plane. Dental records have just identified the man as being Frederick Blackstock. I believe he would have been related to your husband?’

‘Yes.’ Sally Blackstock runs a hand through her hair, leaving it standing up in a crest. She waves a hand vaguely towards the armchairs. ‘Do sit down, Detective er . . .’

‘Nelson.’

‘Yes. Nelson. Like the admiral. Frederick was my husband’s uncle but he emigrated to America in the thirties. We knew he’d died in the war but we were told that his plane went down in the sea with no survivors. My husband will be amazed.’

‘Where’s your husband today?’ asks Nelson, surreptitiously removing a dog’s lead from the cushion of his chair.

‘He’s with Chaz. Our son. He’s got a pig farm near here.’ She pulls a face. ‘I’ll call him. Oh God, where’s the phone? We don’t get much of a mobile signal here,’ she explains to the policemen, ‘so I’ve got one of those cordless phones, but I can never find it.’

Clough finds it under a pile of
Horse & Hound
s and is rewarded by Sally putting the kettle on for tea. She goes into the pantry and they hear her leaving a message for her husband. ‘Darling, something rather amazing’s happened.’ Nelson and Clough exchange glances.

Sally comes back into the room minus the phone. Nelson wonders where she’s put it and whether she’ll ever find it again. Mrs Blackstock, though, is suddenly all charm. She leans on the Aga and beams at the two policemen. ‘The thing is,’ she says cosily, ‘there were three brothers. Shall I tell you the story?’

‘Yes please,’ says Nelson, trying not to sound as if he’s in nursery school. He wonders what Katie’s doing now. Perhaps she too is listening to a story. He sees Clough trying not to laugh.

‘Lewis was the oldest. He fought in the war and was a prisoner in Japan. Had a terrible time by all accounts. Anyway, he was never the same again and, in 1950 or thereabouts, he simply vanished.’

‘Vanished?’ repeats Clough.

‘Yes. They all thought he’d killed himself but no one ever said it aloud. George, my father-in-law, says it was an absolutely terrible time. His mother never could accept that Lewis was gone and she went a bit doolally herself. In the end, though, they had to admit that he wasn’t coming back and Lewis was declared dead in the sixties.’

‘And Frederick had already died in the war?’

‘Yes. He was the second brother. He hated this place, that’s what George always says. He said that the Blackstock land was cursed. He had a vivid imagination, like his mother. So Frederick emigrated to America and he fought with the US Air Force. He died in 1944, leaving George to inherit.’

‘Your father-in-law?’

‘Yes. He never expected to inherit, being the youngest son, but he tried to make a go of the place. My husband is his only child. He’s called George too. Young George, even though he’s pushing sixty.’ She laughs and takes the hissing kettle from the Aga.

‘So the family were told that Frederick’s plane went down over the sea?’ says Nelson, trying not to look as Sally sloshes hot water into the teapot. The police first aid course was a long time ago and he can’t remember what you do about scalds.

‘Yes.’ Sally pours the tea and, after a few minutes’ searching, puts a biscuit tin on the table. ‘That’s why I don’t understand how he could have been found in that plane in the field.’

‘We don’t understand it either,’ says Nelson slowly. The buried plane had been fairly easy to trace. The single-seater Curtiss P-36 Mohawk D for Dog had gone down in a thunderstorm in September 1944. The pilot had ejected and was found dead in an adjacent field. The plane had crashed into a disused quarry and was immediately buried by a landslide caused by the heavy rain. In the light of the fact that the pilot had been found, no attempt was made to recover the plane. Flying Officer Frederick Blackstock, on the other hand, was not meant to be anywhere near D for Dog. He was part of the ten-man crew of a B17 which had been shot down over the English Channel a week earlier.

‘That’s partly why we’re here,’ says Nelson, watching as Clough selects two biscuits conveniently stuck together. ‘If your husband would agree to a DNA test, we could establish beyond any doubt that this Frederick Blackstock was a family member.’

‘I’m sure he’ll agree,’ says Sally. She rolls her eyes upwards. ‘I wish I could tell George, Old George, I mean.’

Her manner is now starting to seem slightly spooky. Why is she looking upwards? To indicate that Old George is watching them from heaven?

‘When did George, Old George, die?’

She laughs again. The laugh, too, is starting to grate. ‘Oh, he’s not dead, Detective Nelson. He’s upstairs having his mid-morning nap.’

CHAPTER 2

Ruth arrives at the school early but is surprised to see that she’s not the only one. There’s already a knot of mothers standing by the entrance to the infant school. What’s more, they all seem to know each other, laughing and exchanging baker’s bags full of after-school treats. Pre-school children are much in evidence, in prams and pushchairs and swinging on the school gates in defiance of signs telling them not to.

Come on, Ruth tells herself, you’ve got to try to be sociable. These are the people who’ll invite Kate to parties and play dates. In time they might become your closest friends. She approaches the group, smiling ingratiatingly. Casually, unselfconsciously, the mothers turn their backs so that all she can see are ponytails and denim jackets. ‘They’re not as nice as the little custardy ones in Asda,’ someone is saying. Ruth edges away, towards the gates. She is ashamed to note that, for the second time that day, she is nearly crying.

But then the door opens and Mrs Mannion stands smiling at the top of the steps. Little figures in blue sweatshirts can be seen jostling in the background. The teacher is careful to see that each child is delivered to the right parent but Ruth is surprised at how casual some of the mothers are. They head off for the gates pushing buggies and chatting to their friends with their five-year-olds trotting behind them. Don’t they know how momentous this day is? thinks Ruth. But then some of the mothers have done this two or three times before. This is Ruth’s only chance to get it right.

Kate is the fifth child to be handed over. She skips down the steps. ‘Mum, we did music and I played the tangerine.’ Mrs Mannion meets Ruth’s eyes over Kate’s (now very untidy) head. ‘She had a great day. Really settled in well.’

‘Thank you,’ says Ruth, more grateful for the tone, which is both warm and professional, than the actual words.

‘Come on, Kate. Let’s go home. I’ve bought crumpets.’

Kate gives a little jump of delight. Crumpets are one of her favourite things.

‘What did you have for lunch?’ asks Ruth as they cut through the stream of parents now heading for the junior school.

‘Meat,’ says Kate briefly. ‘I hated it. Can I have sandwiches tomorrow?’

Near the gates of another school, this one in King’s Lynn, Nelson and Clough have been halted by the peremptory command of a lollipop man. They don’t have the siren on the car and Nelson is quite happy to wait and watch the children straggling across the road carrying paintings and gym shoes and artwork made from crushed tissue paper. How have they accumulated so much stuff on the first day of term?

‘It’s Katie’s first day at school today,’ he tells Clough. The team all know about Kate but it’s rare for Nelson to mention her directly.

Clough doesn’t seem abashed. ‘Bless her heart. She’s growing up fast.’ Clough likes kids. Nelson has noticed this before. He really should meet a nice girl and settle down. Nelson didn’t care for Trace, Clough’s ex, but since the break-up there has been nobody serious. Plenty of the light-hearted variety, if you listen to station gossip, which Nelson tries not to. Then he tells himself that he’s Clough’s boss, not some match-making crone from
Fiddler on the Roof
(he had been forced to watch this when Rebecca was in a school production).

‘What do you think about our pilot?’ he asks. ‘The one who ended up in the wrong plane.’

‘Fred?’ says Clough. He always likes to be on first-name terms with the victim.

‘Yes. Frederick Blackstock. One of the three Blackstock boys. Two dead, one slightly gaga.’

Old George had made his appearance towards the end of the interview at Blackstock Hall. And, though not exactly gaga, he had certainly seemed confused and even hostile.

‘What’s going on, Sally? I thought I heard voices.’

‘It’s the police, Dad. They’ve come to talk to us about the plane that was found in Devil’s Hollow.’

Sally’s tone had been soothing, conciliatory. Young George, who had arrived a few minutes earlier, said nothing. Nelson noticed that Sally called her father-in-law ‘Dad’; he has never been able to call his mother-in-law ‘Mum’, maybe because he still has his own mother and she sometimes feels like one maternal figure too many. He also noted the ominous name of the field: Devil’s Hollow. Jesus wept.

‘What’s that got to do with us?’ Old George had said. ‘Land doesn’t belong to us any more. We sold it to that developer fella, didn’t we? Chaz kicked up a fuss about it.’

‘We sold it to Edward Spens,’ says Sally. ‘He’s a nice chap.’

Old George had grunted but had seemed slightly mollified by the mention of Edward Spens. Probably glad that the land went to someone with the right sort of accent, thought Nelson, remembering his own encounters with the Spens family. Whatever you say about the upper classes, they certainly like to stick together.

Now he says, ‘The question is, where has Fred’s body been hiding all this time? And who thought that it would be a bright idea to put it in the plane?’

‘I thought Ruth was onto that,’ said Clough.

‘She sent some samples off for analysis,’ says Nelson. ‘She said tests might be able to tell us if the bones had originally been buried elsewhere, what sort of soil and all that. Trouble is, it all takes so long.’

Nelson hates waiting for anything, particularly forensic tests. He remembers his early days as a policeman in Blackpool, when they would just hand a bloodstained bag to the in-house team: ‘Forensicate that, will you?’ Now they have to send away to some private forensics firm, and when the results come back they are hedged with so many ‘mights’ and ‘maybes’ that they are almost useless in court.

‘What’s the hurry?’ says Clough. He might be talking about his boss’s driving. Free from the admonishing lollipop they are now speeding through the outskirts of King’s Lynn. ‘Chap’s been dead for seventy years. Ruth was pretty sure of that.’

‘But someone put him in that plane quite recently. Why?’

‘To stop the development? Hasn’t there been a bit of fuss about it?’

Nelson wonders if his sergeant is trying to be funny. ‘A bit of fuss’ hardly describes the bitter arguments played out in the local press over the summer. As far as Nelson can make out, the field (Devil’s Hollow, God help us) is a site of both historical and natural interest. It’s very near the place where Ruth found her Bronze Age skeleton and many people, Ruth included, think there may be a barrow cemetery nearby. It’s also apparently the home of several rare plants and birds. There were also rumours – strenuously denied – that an energy company was going to start drilling on the land using the controversial fracking technique. Nelson remembers that the Blackstocks’ son, Chaz, had been against the sale of the field.