Green and Pleasant Land

by Judith Cutler

  ‘So you’re nothing to do with the local police.’

  And why was that important? ‘Only inasmuch as they pay our fee, which we donate to charity. All – all – we want is to find out what happened to Natalie. No recriminations, no nothing. We just want facts.’

  ‘Like Mr Gradgrind,’ Mark supplied, popping his head round the door.

  Bethan Carter blossomed under the warmth of his everyday smile, getting to her feet and putting her hand in his, tiny, confiding. Feeling elephantine, Fran stood too. ‘Mark, sweetheart, Bethan and I have been having a lovely girlie gossip, but I’ve not written anything down yet, have I, Bethan? Why don’t you do the pen-pushing stuff, darling, while I keep my appointment with – heavens, I’m late already. Sorry, Bethan – see you when we do that piece for you, if not before!’ She felt ashamed of herself for so obviously laying claim to her man. Or perhaps not.

  Mark hesitated. ‘Might I just have a word before you shoot off?’

  They stepped outside. He closed the door. ‘The skeletons,’ he murmured. ‘Hugh tried to call you but your phone was off.’

  She nodded, jerking a thumb in the direction of the door. Then it was the fingers-and-thumb-closing we were yakking gesture.

  ‘Anyway, they’re not our skeletons. About twelve centuries too old. And no, I’ve not heard officially. But it might pay you to find out what official notification the Garbutts have had before you and Robyn go marching in.’

  ELEVEN

  ‘Hi, gaffer,’ a very smart Robyn greeted her as she walked into the incident room. ‘You look as if you’ve lost a pound and found a rusty button.’

  ‘I’ve just spent half an hour trying to get a possible witness to talk, and Mark comes in and she eats out of his hand.’ She demonstrated a winsome smile and flirtatious body language.

  ‘Pity she’s not going to find her teeth closing on a wedding ring. Why don’t men wear them?’ Robyn asked rhetorically. ‘We do, both of us. Hers and hers, you might say.’

  ‘Mark had one but he kept taking it off to do dirty jobs, and now it lies unworn in its little chamois bag. Very sad. Now, I take it the court didn’t sit.’

  ‘Nope. And there’s this flood of top brass descending on the city, too – army, Environment Agency, city councillors, MPs. There’s a big meeting to decide what to do if the water gets any higher – it’s already up to its previous highest, which is a couple of hundred years back. Oh, and the media have descended. Can’t move for satellite dishes.’ Robyn smiled shyly. ‘You said something about going to Buttonoak? With you?’

  ‘If you don’t mind. You know the roads; I don’t. You’ve got people skills. Let’s use them.’

  ‘Wouldn’t Mark—?’

  ‘Between ourselves, I wouldn’t mind betting he ends up having to buy that woman lunch as the price for two pieces of information you couldn’t rub together to make a clue. Paula and I had a trip out yesterday. It’ll probably be Stu’s turn tomorrow. So are you up for a trip? You’ll have to drive, of course, unless I take our car. But first, and since you’ll know exactly who to ask, we need to know how your colleagues reacted to the news of the skeletons yesterday and now today.’

  ‘Today? Oh, Fran—’

  ‘I gather they might be Saxon. Anyway, we must know what the family liaison people told the Garbutts – and how, of course. Both pieces of news.’

  Calm and charming Mark may have appeared to Bethan, but when Fran nipped in to get her coat and boots, he sent up a clear distress flare. She responded with something that popped up in her head from nowhere – and which should have popped up a good deal earlier.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt.’ Yes, she genuinely sounded it. Amazing and ironic that working for the police taught you to lie beautifully. She grabbed her things and made to leave. At the door she stopped. ‘Mark: don’t forget you promised to call Gerry Barnes. He said it was urgent, remember,’ she lied.

  ‘Damn. So he did.’ Maybe Mark’s reaction, hitting his forehead with the flat of his hand, was a little melodramatic. But, checking his watch, he stood swiftly.

  ‘Can you call me and let me know how you got on? Robyn and I are just leaving,’ she added, so he’d know he wasn’t in on the Garbutt interview. She blew him a kiss and left.

  There was no doubting the anger in Jeanette Garbutt’s face, watching them from her kitchen window as they pulled up slowly outside her bungalow. Anger that this was the third visit by police officers in the space of twenty-four hours: the first had been to bring news of the remains; the second to confirm that the remains weren’t those of her daughter. And now she had two completely different officers who claimed they were still investigating Natalie’s disappearance. Fran would probably have felt the same. Flat anger.

  The two women said all that was proper, Robyn referring to her family liaison colleagues by name and echoing their apologies for raising expectations in the first place and then for dashing them. Mrs Garbutt nodded briefly in acknowledgement, and put the kettle on.

  Consciously or not, Robyn set about justifying her claims that she was a people person, not by crudely insisting on carrying a laden tea tray through to a sitting room that occupied the whole of one side of the bungalow – Fran did that – but by emanating a gentle but specific interest in her target. Body language? Facial expression? Her voice? Fran would have loved to have time to sit back and analyse the young woman’s performance. Except it wasn’t a performance: Robyn was clearly relating to this stranger in a way Fran wasn’t, however much she tried to pretend she was.

  Mrs Garbutt carried her five foot six or seven inches well, with still broad shoulders refusing to stoop. Her short grey hair was well cut, and her outfit – trousers and a shirt topped by a waistcoat – no-nonsense. Her only concession to age was Velcro-fastened shoes. Mr Garbutt lurked in a corner, next to a bookshelf. Fran headed towards him, shaking hands with him and finding a seat near his. He was stick frail, but his eyes suggested that whatever was harming his body hadn’t reached his brain yet.

  Robyn shook hands with him, introducing both herself and Fran formally.

  Mrs Garbutt raised a quizzical eyebrow as Robyn added the prefix ex to the rest of Fran’s former rank. ‘We’ve never had such exalted police company before,’ she said. ‘Ex or not. It used to be constables we got; yesterday and this morning, of course, it was a sergeant. First to say they’d found skeletons; now to say they may not be the right skeletons. So what brings you now – ex-Detective Chief Superintendent Harman?’

  Fran raised a placatory hand. ‘Perhaps you’d be kind enough to call me Fran. The only connection I have with the West Mercia Police now is that they’ve asked me to recheck their investigation.’

  ‘Ah, digging up the past’s quite fashionable these days, isn’t it?’ Mr Garbutt observed. ‘Jimmy Savile and all that. So what do you hope to find, ma’am? That’s how they speak to people like you on TV,’ he added, with a twist of a smile.

  ‘Ex-ma’am, too,’ Fran retorted. ‘And you know what, I never did get used to it. Really I’m here as an adviser. Robyn’s the one doing all the work.’

  Robyn responded to Fran’s smile with one of her own. ‘I’d call her gaffer. But she insists on Fran. Lovely cake, Mrs Garbutt—’

  ‘Co-op.’ Mrs Garbutt clearly wasn’t a woman for blandishments.

  Robyn didn’t wince, but carried on, missing hardly a beat. ‘As I said on the phone, we just want, without intruding on your time or your privacy, to see if we can complete the original enquiry all those years ago.’

  ‘Is it to do with some crazy government target? You have to solve x number of crimes? Like you suddenly target speeding motorists you’ve ignored for months?’ Mr Garbutt asked.

  ‘Not this one,’ Robyn said. ‘Forces can always improve current investigations by learning the mistakes of past ones.’

  Mrs Garbutt snorted. ‘You’ve come sniffing round here, you and your other friends, churning up memories, so you can do better next time?’

  ‘So we can do bette
r with other grief-stricken families in your position – not just us, but our colleagues all over the country. As I said on the phone, we want to make this as short and painless as we can. If at any time you want us to leave, we will.’ Robyn paused.

  The Garbutts exchanged a glance. Fran suspected that for all his frailty and her truculence, the husband’s will was stronger than the wife’s, and that his desire to continue with the conversation would trump hers to end it.

  ‘What would you want to ask us? I thought we’d answered all your questions at the time,’ he said.

  ‘Of course. These are what you might call supplementary questions. Again, if there’s anything you don’t want to answer …’ Robyn looked from one to the other. ‘I understand you’ve moved here from what was the family house at the time,’ she began, neutrally.

  ‘We moved about five years ago: there was no point the two of us rattling round in a place that size. So if you were hoping for another rake through her room you’ll be disappointed. We took everything to a charity shop, the whole lot. It might as well do some good, mightn’t it?’

  Robyn’s expression was neutral. But Fran saw her let her eyes drift in the old man’s direction. What was his view?

  ‘He’d have kept everything,’ Mrs Garbutt declared. ‘Wouldn’t you? As for the grandchildren – we kept … precious things. But I don’t want to go poking through them now, thank you very much. If you want to do that, you can take the box away. Father’ll show you where it is. Not that he can lift it down himself. But a strapping woman like ex-ma’am here should be able to.’

  ‘Thank you. Would you prefer us to get it down now or when we leave?’

  ‘On your way out.’

  ‘Very well. Just one thing: do you ever remember Phil asking for keepsakes of her, or offering anything from their marital home you might have cherished?’

  Mrs Garbutt pursed her lips. Her raised eyebrow told Robyn not to ask such stupid questions.

  Fran, however, thought it was a very good one. ‘Nothing at all? No? Tell me, how did you decide what you wanted to keep?’

  ‘She’d know,’ Mrs Garbutt declared, nodding in Robyn’s direction. ‘If she’s got children.’

  Robyn responded quietly, ‘Not yet. Now, I hope these questions won’t be too intrusive. One concerns Natalie’s friends. Did you ever meet any of them? Did she ever bring any of them here?’

  ‘Her school-friends, some of them. But they’ve all grown up and moved away, haven’t they?’

  ‘So you’re not in touch with any now? What about friends she made later in her life, at university or in London? Can you recall any names at least?’

  ‘After all this time?’

  Nodding as if in sympathy, not frustration, Robyn tried a different tack. ‘Now, I know this will be painful. I’m sorry. Little Julius. It must have been very hard for you …’ She left the question unfinished: was it having the disabled grandchild in the first place that was hard or having him die in such difficult circumstances? When there was no reply, she continued, ‘We know Edwards’ syndrome can be detected before the baby is born. Yet Natalie continued with her pregnancy. Did that surprise you?’

  ‘You mean why didn’t she have another abortion?’

  Robyn said nothing, but her whole body conveyed a sort of shocked sympathy. ‘Did the first fetus have the same problem?’ she asked eventually.

  ‘Oh, she said it wasn’t viable, whatever that means. But we always thought it was just because she thought it was inconvenient. Anyway, it broke up her relationship with young whatshisname. Nice young man. He offered to stand by her. But no, off she went and … Anyway, young Hadrian came along, bright as a button. Oh, he was a little gem, that one. Apple of his father’s eye.’ And his grandparents’, evidently. ‘And then Julius …’

  ‘Did they hope that the doctors had made a mistake, perhaps? That Julius would be OK?’ Robyn was evidently not going to get an answer. Perhaps there wasn’t one that the Garbutts could give; perhaps not one that Natalie could have offered either. So Robyn tried a different approach. ‘What did you feel about Philip Foreman?’

  ‘What do you mean? Us feel? Nat made a dead set at him, by all accounts.’

  ‘And why shouldn’t she?’ Mr Garbutt put in. ‘Fine well set-up young man. More money than sense, I’ll grant you. But Nat had enough sense for both – she was the first from our family to go to university, and I tell you straight, if she could have come and worked with me, I’d have been pleased as punch. Talk about a head for figures. And she knew her stuff. Even when she left work to have the baby, young Hadrian, she kept up with things – always reading the financial pages of the paper, the parts I always use to start the fire. So Phil made the money – a lot, they said – and she invested it. They made a good team.’

  ‘Did you see much of them? Babysitting and such?’

  ‘Grandparents’ privilege.’ Mr Garbutt turned to Fran. ‘You got any?’

  ‘I share my husband’s two. And pour his G and T when they go home. He brought them up to the railway up here.’

  ‘Good job it wasn’t yesterday when they found the skeletons,’ Mrs Garbutt said.

  Fran made sure she didn’t react; Robyn too stayed neutral. They were both used to black humour in the police, but neither expected to hear it from her. Was that because she was bereaved, Fran wondered, or because old people weren’t expected to make such mordant remarks? Well, they knew Mrs Garbutt was no knitting-by-the-fire grannie, so let her have her quip.

  ‘According to local radio the archaeologists think there may be more,’ her husband added. ‘That sergeant won’t be round each time they unearth one, will she?’

  Fran framed a response: No, it’ll cost too damned much.

  Robyn asked, ‘Would you rather she simply phoned?’

  ‘I’d rather she did nothing at all till she’s got something useful to say. Now, is there anything else?’ Mrs Garbutt demanded.

  ‘We were just asking how much you saw of your grandchildren. You said you had a big family house – did Natalie bring them to stay with you?’

  ‘Not after poor little Julius was born. He needed a lot of specialist equipment we didn’t have. And then there was their nanny. Nowhere to put her. We used to see them in their posh house in Birmingham more than here – especially when the Albion were playing away from home.’

  ‘You never saw them with him?’

  ‘Did I say that? I said especially. Of course we saw him. As Father says, he didn’t have a lot between the ears. Kept talking about a cure for Julius, daft lump. Thought he might walk and talk. Not that Hadrian ever did anything else. He was a handful, that lad. And his dad would egg him on, when he should have disciplined him. Said he needed to grow into a man, not some niminy-piminy mother’s boy like his brother.’

  ‘Just think, talking about poor Julius like that,’ added Mr Garbutt.

  ‘How did Natalie react when he did?’ Fran asked.

  ‘She didn’t. Ever. Not in front of us, anyway. Or in front of the children. She was a good mother. Even with Julius, she did everything. She only had that nanny because Phil thought she was doing too much. And she was, too.’

  Fran nodded. If it had been any other woman she’d have pressed her hand in sympathy. Instead, she was about to kick her, metaphorically at least, in the teeth. ‘Natalie wasn’t there, of course, to do the final act of kindness to him – organize his funeral. Did Philip …?’

  ‘Him?’ Mrs Garbutt was silent for a long time, her face increasingly grim. But at last she said grudgingly, ‘Well, to do them justice, the Albion welfare people were really helpful – some young woman kept in touch by phone until the roads were cleared, and I’ll swear she was one of the first through to see us. She helped a lot. We wanted him buried here, of course, since Phil never went to church. Some idiot said it should be in Birmingham Cathedral or in some posh church where they lived. But they’d never put down roots, and weren’t going to, were they? So this woman – Lizzie, I think she was called �
� helped set up the service and dealt with a lot of the paperwork. Of course, she knew Natalie by sight, didn’t she, Father? So the little mite’s in the churchyard here, where we can keep an eye on him.’

  No mention of her daughter or the other child. Meanwhile, Robyn personified intelligent sympathy, but she said nothing. Neither did Fran. At last Robyn must have sensed Mrs Garbutt wanted to move the conversation on, and took up the questioning again.

  ‘You mentioned that Philip insisted they have a nanny. You must have met her: what did you think of her?’

  ‘Was it our place to think anything of her?’

  Fran couldn’t let that one pass. ‘Come on, Mrs Garbutt, no one loves kids more than their grandparents: of course you’d have opinions, good or bad.’ She wished the words unsaid the moment they left her lips, but Mrs Garbutt actually smiled.

  ‘Father and I didn’t agree. You liked her, didn’t you, Father? Young Anna? I wasn’t sure how far anyone could trust her. And then, of course, she left just like that!’ She snapped her fingers. ‘Walked out. Only a couple of weeks before – before …’

  ‘I still think Phil sacked her. He had a temper, that lad. And if something wasn’t just so, he probably yelled at her, and either she walked out, because there’s only so much you can take, or he sacked her. And – come on, Mother, admit it – she still keeps in touch. We get a card from her every Christmas.’

  Mrs Garbutt flashed him a look of undiluted fury. As offhand as she could be, she demanded, ‘Well, what’s a card?’

  Robyn asked, ‘Do you send her one – for old times’ sake?’

  ‘Just a cheap one. Nothing fancy.’ Mrs Garbutt’s mouth shut like a door in a gale.

  ‘In that case, would you be kind enough to give us her address? Just for our records.’

  Fran could have sworn that Mrs Garbutt would deny she knew where it was, but Mr Garbutt struggled to his feet and shuffled over to an antique bureau rather too large for a modern house. In his place, though, Fran would also have wanted to keep it, even if its elegant proportions made those of the room seem prosaic.