The Ghost Fields (Ruth Galloway) (5 page)

‘I think we should visit Chaz next,’ he says.

‘Doesn’t he own a pig farm?’ asks Clough, grimacing.

‘Nothing wrong with a bit of pig muck,’ says Nelson, swerving into the entrance to the police station. ‘Aren’t you a country boy?’

Clough says nothing. Nelson thinks that he might be offended by the description – Clough goes to great lengths to seem urban and edgy – but, not for the first time, he does his sergeant an injustice. Clough has been thinking.

‘Where is this pig farm? Lockwell Heath? Out Brancaster way?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Isn’t that where the airfield was? The American airbase.’

‘That’s right,’ says Nelson. ‘The War Office said that the land had returned to agriculture.’

‘What if it’s a pig farm?’

‘You’ve got something there, Cloughie. Let’s go and see this Chaz tomorrow.’

When they enter the station, DS Judy Johnson is sitting in the desk sergeant’s chair (with some difficulty, as she is heavily pregnant).

‘Where have you been?’

‘Blackstock Hall,’ says Nelson. ‘Then we drove over to Eye to follow up on those drugs leads. It’s in the log book.’ He says this rather defensively as he is often accused (by his boss, Superintendant Gerry Whitcliffe) of poor communication.

‘You can’t go out five minutes,’ says Judy, ‘without upsetting someone.’

‘Who is it this time?’ asks Clough, eying Judy warily as she gets to her feet. He is terrified that she will go into premature labour any day soon.

‘One George Blackstock,’ says Judy. ‘He rang about an hour ago, accusing you of harassing his family.’

‘Did he now?’ says Nelson. ‘Well, he hasn’t seen anything yet.’ Then he has a thought. ‘Was it Old George or Young George?’

‘Sounded pretty old to me,’ says Judy, moving towards the stairs.

‘Shouldn’t you be going home?’ says Clough. ‘Put your feet up?’

Judy smiles. ‘Don’t worry, Cloughie. Cathbad’s done the birth chart and he says the baby’s going to be late.’

Nelson and Clough exchange glances. ‘Cathbad’s a midwife now, is he?’ says Nelson. Actually it wouldn’t surprise him if Cathbad had done some lunatic course on DIY home births. Cathbad, Judy’s partner, is a druid with an uncanny knack of turning up at the right, or at any rate the most tense, moment. He had been with Ruth when she had Katie, Nelson remembers.

‘No,’ says Judy with dignity, ‘but Cathbad just knows things.’

And no one can really argue with that.

CHAPTER 3

Clough’s hunch was correct. As Nelson drives across Lockwell Heath, he sees rows and rows of pigsties, endless lower-case letter ‘m’s silhouetted against the sky, but in the foreground there is what was unmistakably once a control tower, a square building topped with a hexagonal viewing tower. The doors and windows are boarded up but the steps to the tower remain in place, a rusting iron spiral. Sprayed on the wall are the words ‘Bomb Group’. Nelson stops the car and he and Clough look at each other. There is something incredibly poignant about the building, so obviously deserted but equally obviously once vitally important. The wind, which is blowing strongly across the flat fields, rattles the wooden slats as if someone inside is trying to get out. The clouds above are brooding and grey.

‘Bloody hell,’ says Nelson. ‘What a creepy place.’

‘There are a lot of these abandoned airfields in Norfolk,’ says Clough. ‘They call them the ghost fields.’

The ghost fields. Nelson’s not a fanciful man but, just for a second, he imagines the sky full of lumbering Second World War planes, rising into the clouds and heading out to sea. He thinks of the men inside the control tower listening to their final briefing, not knowing whether they’ll ever come back.

Clough’s voice brings him back down to earth. ‘I suppose this was the runway.’ He points at the wide concrete path in front of them.

‘I suppose so.’ Nelson starts the car. As they get closer, they see two vast corrugated-iron sheds, big enough to house a plane.

‘Hangars,’ says Clough.

‘Chaz is certainly making use of what was left behind.’

‘Pigs on an airfield,’ says Clough. ‘It doesn’t seem right somehow.’

‘Pigs might fly,’ says Nelson darkly.

Chaz Blackstock, who strides towards them from the direction of the largest shed, could easily have wandered in from a film about the First of the Few. He’s even wearing a leather jacket. He’s also tall and dark, with an effortless air of command. Only his shoulder-length hair strikes a twenty-first-century note. Nelson is prepared to dislike Chaz on sight but the voice disarms him. Instead of echoing his parents’ upper-class accents, Chaz speaks in a low hesitant tone with more than a shade of Norfolk about the vowels.

‘Detective Chief Inspector Nelson? Pleased to meet you.’

‘Thank you for seeing us. This is Detective Sergeant Clough.’

The two men nod at each other. Nelson can see Clough trying not to breathe through his nose. The smell of pig is all-pervasive.

‘You know why we’re here?’

‘Yes. It’s about Uncle Fred’s body being found. What a turn-up for the books.’

‘You could say that,’ says Nelson, though it’s not a term that he would ever use. ‘Is there somewhere we can talk?’

‘Yes. In the house. It’s just a step away, across the next field.’ He points to where a long, low building seems to be hunkering down in the grass, as if to escape the wind.

‘Bit blowy today,’ says Nelson as they set out.

‘Yes,’ says Chaz. ‘I’d really like to put up a few wind turbines here. It’s fabulously flat.’

It is certainly flat but Nelson finds it hard to see what’s so fabulous about that. There’s a desolate feel about the whole place, the boarded-up tower like a sentry at the gate, the wind blowing through the iron buildings with a high keening sound. The presence of the pigs, grunting and shuffling in their pens, doesn’t help at all.

‘What’s in the old hangars?’ asks Clough, stepping carefully at Nelson’s side. From sheep shit to pig muck, thinks Nelson. Clough really shouldn’t wear such expensive shoes. Even though they look like trainers.

‘Farrowing sheds,’ says Chaz, ‘dry sow house, pig finishing house, weaning pens.’

The policemen are both silent. Nelson wonders if he’s heard right. Pig finishing house?

‘How big is the farm?’ he asks after a pause.

‘Thirteen acres,’ says Chaz. ‘Small but perfectly formed.’ He smiles rather charmingly, revealing a gap between his front teeth. ‘You know, it’s always been my dream to own a place like this.’

That was what his mother had said. ‘Chaz was never interested in school work. Oh, he was bright enough but he just wasn’t motivated. All he ever wanted to do was run his own farm.’

‘Well, he’s achieved his ambition,’ Nelson had replied. ‘Not many people do that.’

‘Yes,’ Sally had said. But Nelson thought that she sounded unconvinced. Chaz’s sister, Cassandra, is apparently an actress, ‘doing experimental plays in Lincoln’. Nelson thought that Sally didn’t sound too delighted about that either.

But now Chaz shows an almost touching pride in his windswept collection of farm buildings. The house too, a sixties bungalow in urgent need of painting and repair, is presented as if it’s a palace. As if it’s Blackstock Hall, in fact.

‘Here’s the old homestead. Let’s go into the kitchen. It’s cosy in there.’

Cosy isn’t quite the word Nelson would use to describe the sagging cabinets, rusting cooker and motley collection of chairs, but at least they are out of the wind. Chaz puts on the kettle and Clough tries surreptitiously to scrape mud (or worse) off his shoe.

‘So . . . Chaz,’ says Nelson. He has been invited to use this name but it still seems wrong somehow. ‘You’ve heard that the body in the plane has been positively identified as your great-uncle Frederick Blackstock?’

‘I thought you were going to do some DNA tests on Dad?’

‘Yes. That’s just to confirm the family link but the dental records were fairly conclusive.’

‘None of us can understand how he got in that plane,’ says Chaz, getting out a selection of mismatched mugs. ‘We all thought that his plane went down over the sea.’

‘Who told you that?’

Chaz frowns. ‘Dad, I suppose. Or maybe Grandpa. He used to talk about the war sometimes.’

Nelson hasn’t heard from Old George since the initial complaint about police harassment. In Nelson’s view this was a pretty extreme reaction to some gentle questioning. He wonders why the old man feels so threatened.

‘Your granddad mentioned to us that you were against the sale of the field where the plane was found.’

Chaz hesitates before replying, or maybe he is just occupied with pouring the tea. As he puts the mugs in front of them, he says, with no change in his hesitantly charming manner, ‘I was against it, yes. I mean, I know the old dears needed the money, but it’s breaking up the estate.’

‘Breaking up the estate.’ An old-school phrase if there ever was one. Of course Chaz will be in line to inherit the estate. Or is Cassandra older? In any case, there’s probably some feudal principle that favours the son over the daughter.

‘And that ghastly man, Edward Spens,’ says Chaz, sitting down at the table. He has taken off his jacket and there are holes in both elbows of his jumper. ‘He wants to build houses on the site. Hundreds of horrid little hen houses.’

Pig houses would presumably be perfectly acceptable, thinks Nelson.

‘Would be better than fracking though, wouldn’t it?’ says Clough. Nelson is glad to see that he’s been reading up on the issues.

‘I don’t know,’ Chaz runs his hands through his hair. However much he rumples it, his thick dark hair always ends up falling across his face in a perfect Hugh Grant fringe. ‘At least with fracking you wouldn’t get hundreds of people living in what’s practically our front garden.’

Nelson thinks that there are a couple of interesting things about this statement. Firstly, for all the holes in his sleeves, there’s enough of the lord of the manor in Chaz to make him resent the arrival of hordes of plebeians at his gate. Secondly, although he is living away from home – living on his dream farm, in fact – Chaz still refers to ‘our front garden’.

‘When was the last time you went to Devil’s Hollow?’ asks Nelson. He still has trouble saying the name with a straight face. ‘Have you been there since the land was sold?’

‘I went once or twice,’ says Chaz. ‘Just to see what Spens was playing at. He says he isn’t building lots of houses on the land but any fool can see that’s what he’s planning. I spoke to his oafish digger driver and he admitted that they’d been told to clear the land as quickly as possible.’

‘You spoke to the driver? When? I thought work had only just started when the plane was found.’

‘I can’t remember.’ Chaz turns away flicking back a lock of hair so that it falls perfectly. ‘It might even have been on the morning of the day that they found Uncle Fred.’

‘You were there that morning?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘And you didn’t see the plane?’

‘No. The bloke had just started work when I got there. It was a bloody hot day. I didn’t hang around.’

‘Will you go back again, when they start work again?’

Chaz looks up. ‘But they can’t go on with the work, not while the police investigation’s going on. That’s what I thought.’

Nelson shrugs. ‘We’ve finished with the land. Doctor Galloway excavated the body and examined the context. We’ve got the plane out. As far as I can see, Edward Spens has the place to himself again.’

‘What about the archaeology dig nearby?’ says Chaz. ‘Didn’t they find something really significant?’

‘I think so,’ says Nelson. He remembers Ruth telling him about some Bronze Age body but he hadn’t been listening properly, to be honest. He does remember that she said something about the television people being interested.

‘The dig might be on TV,’ he says. ‘That’s what I’ve heard.’

Chaz beams, suddenly expansive. ‘If TV get involved, then all our problems are solved.’

What problems would they be? wonders Nelson.