Leo read the article three times and with each reading her certainty grew.
Tears leapt into her eyes. She tried to convince herself that she was jumping to false conclusions. But all her unspoken fears of the last weeks pointed to this. Only to this. It was fine and well for Norfolk to insist that Isabel had simply gone underground to carry out a delicate investigation, perhaps to acknowledge that she might have gotten into some kind trouble. But Leo’s intuition, the intuition she didn’t want to confront, was this: Isabel’s life shattered by a terrible violence beyond her control.
‘What’s up, Holland? I’m not that late.’ Norfolk dropped a bundle of pink-backed maps on the table. ‘These are for lunch and this is for later.’ He waved two large plastic bags in the air before depositing them on the floor. ‘What are you drinking?’
‘I’ll get the drinks. You read this.’ Leo’s voice cracked as she pointed to the article.
‘Yes, sir. Make mine a pint of bitter and I wouldn’t say no to a couple of rounds of something between brown bread. Smile, Holland,’ he cajoled her. ‘The day’s only beginning.’
‘Read.’ She gave him her back.
When she returned he was drumming his fingers on the table. ‘And you think this unidentified woman is Isabel?’
Leo nodded.
He took a long sip of his beer and stared at her reflectively.
‘We have to get over to Barnstaple. If you don’t want to come, I’ll go on my own.’
‘Have I said anything yet?’
‘I could feel you objecting.’
‘Stop feeling,’ he ruffled her hair gently. ‘I just don’t like having to alter my well-laid plans.’ He gestured at the maps. ‘All those sites in there are longing to be investigated. But you’re right. Though we should phone first. Just to check whether an identification has been made since the paper went to press.’
Leo nodded, but didn’t move.
‘Right. I’ll phone.’
She watched him stride over to the bar, exchange a few words with the woman behind it, then disappear through a door. A bleak numbness overtook her, so that when he returned she could barely make out his words.
‘All set. We can go straight to the morgue. At the hospital. We’re to ask for a D.I. Rawlence. Grab those sandwiches, Holland. We’re going to need sustenance.’
The road curled and stretched and climbed before them like a ribbon blown into erratic activity by the wind. They drove through rolling, sheep-strewn fields which on a different occasion would have provided yelps of pastoral delight. Sleepy villages, studded with thatch, grew straight out of steeply-banked hedgerows bursting with spring green. Beyond, hills and valleys offered a patchwork of irregualr shapes. Brashly yellow gorse sat astride rounded slopes and competed with neatly ploughed furrows.
Near Barnstaple, traffic ground to a standstill. It increased their impotent tension. Leo couldn’t find words. She was floating in the realms of the unspeakable, her hands clenched, her nails digging into soft flesh. Norfolk flicked radio stations. At each new light, inane chatter burst into pop songs and back again in an interminable cycle.
Suddenly he pointed to a road sign announcing ‘Hospital’ and veered sharply to the right.
It took some twenty long minutes to reach the set of sprawling buildings situated in a dip of the hills at the far edge of town, another twenty to locate the morgue. Still more time to convince a recalcitrant nurse that they had to see D.I. Rawlence. At last, they were shown to a creaky leatherette sofa at the edge of a bleak corridor. They perched and waited.
A tiny woman with mottled skin emerged from a door. She walked slowly, pausing every few minutes to lean against the wall, as if only its solidity could contain her bewilderment. Minutes later, a man came out. He was sturdy, his cheeks pink from weather or drink. The look he turned on them was sour.
Norfolk didn’t give him time to speak. ‘Detective Inspector Rawlence. We’ve been sent by Faraday of the Metropolitan Police. There’s a very real possibility that the dead woman you found may be our missing friend. We’re her only contacts in Britain. We’ve come for an identification. I take it she hasn’t been…yet.’
The officer scrutinised them. ‘That’s all right then. But the lady stays out here. The last one fainted on me.’
Norfolk met Leo’s eyes.
‘No. The waiting is worse. I’m coming in.’
‘You heard her, Inspector.’
The policeman shrugged. ‘Don’t know what it is, but the entire population of the South West, seems to have developed a taste for cadavers. Suit yourself,’ he grumbled. ‘And I need some ID.’ He pressed a bell on the door and a medic appeared, a long plastic bib over his white coat.
‘You see to this, doctor. I’ve had enough.’
The man ushered them into a long room illuminated only by one powerful lamp at its far end, where a uniformed woman stood The air was chill and reeked of chemicals. Leo’s grip on Norfolk’s hand grew tighter.
‘I’m working on her now,’ the doctor offered as he led them towards the light.
In its glare Leo saw a slab of a table, a naked body on its surface. The woman’s hair was copious and brightly golden, the neck at an odd angle, so that the face looked away from them. Leo could feel the blood draining out of her as quickly as her courage. Her heart was thudding loudly. It seemed to echo from the ceiling of the room back into her ringing ears. She leaned heavily on Norfolk.
‘Come round here,’ the doctor urged them forward, then remembering himself, quickly pulled a sheet up to cover nakedness. ‘She doesn’t look too bad.’ Leo had the odd sense he was inviting them to examine a picture in an exhibition. ‘Except for the cuts on the face. Not much blood, which is what’s odd.’
Leo couldn’t bring her eyes to the table. Images of Isabel raced through her mind obliterating everything round her. Isabel dancing at a party. Isabel sitting across from her at a food-strewn table, her face animated, her mouth curved in laughter. Isabel stroking Beast, her features soft with tenderness.
‘It’s not her,’ Norfolk’s voice penetrated her consciousness. He was guiding her closer to the body. ‘Much too young. Poor kid.’
Leo raised her eyes to take in the full face of a girl not all that much older than Becca. She shuddered. Thick lashes shadowed cheeks that were too pale. Lips that bore the traces of dark lipstick arched over slightly gapped teeth, giving the face an air of surprise. Surprised by a dream. Or a nightmare. Tiny lines like imprints on old porcelain marked the cheeks.
‘Did the impact kill her?’ Norfolk’s voice seemed to come from a long way away.
‘That’s what’s curious. There wasn’t that much of a bang, but the windows of the car were shattered. We’re just running the tests. Looks like drugs. And the position of the body was odd. There’s a bit of ….’ He stopped his garrulous flow. ‘You’d better talk to the police.’
Leo felt Norfolk’s arm urging her on, but her feet wouldn’t take the necessary steps. She stared at the girl transfixed. So this was death. Like sleep, but utterly unlike. There was no breath. An intangible substance that separated two such different states. Separated them permanently.
‘Come on, Holland.’ Norfolk whispered. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
The door of the hospital had just hissed shut behind them, when Norfolk stopped abruptly. His fingers dug into her shoulder.
‘Holland. I’m an A-1 arsehole.’ His face had turned a sickly white beneath the tan. ‘I know that woman. It’s just come to me. The nakedness… it confused me. And I was so shit-scared of finding Isabel. Come on.’
She held him back. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘The woman. The dead girl. She’s the one I talked to at Plantagen. Last week. Jill Reid, that was her name. I don’t believe it. They wouldn’t… Not that.’
‘What are you talking about Norfolk?’
He wasn’t listening. He was dragging her back into the interstices of the hospital.
‘She could have been th
e one who sent Isabel the diskette. But they wouldn’t… they wouldn’t go that far.’
Leo stepped in front of him and blocked his path. ‘Who wouldn’t? Wouldn’t go what far?’ He paused, his expression grimmer than she had ever seen it. ‘The biotech companies. Plantagen. They might indulge in a little burglary, spying, coercion, indirectly provoke famines. But murder…’
‘Who mentioned murder, Norfolk?’ Leo’s voice was shrill. People turned to stare at them. Leo took hold of her tone ‘Nobody said anything about murder,’ she whispered, realising she was contradicting her own earlier instincts. ‘It was an accident.’
‘You weren’t listening to the doctor, Holland. Come on.’
She pulled back. ‘I… I don’t want to go in there again.’
‘OK.’ He met her eyes for a moment and gave her a quick hug. ‘OK, you wait outside. Take some deep breaths. No, wait a minute. First of all you go and ring Faraday. Just alert him to this.’
‘Why? You think Isabel…?’ She couldn’t finish her question.
‘I’m not thinking now. Just tell him. Jesus. The poor girl said to me she was just going off on a short break too. I hope I didn’t step in there with my big feet and provoke something.’
He was gone before Leo could press him any further. She did as he had said. She found a pay phone and left a slightly incoherent message for Faraday, remembering only at the last minute to mention names, Jill Reid and Plantagen and D.I. Rawlence and Barnstaple. Then, she went and sat on a bench in front of the hospital and listened to the wail of ambulance sirens. But all she could see was the dead girl’s scratched, ashen face.
When Norfolk returned, he was terse and in a hurry. He deflected her questions. ‘D.I. Rawlence got in touch with Plantagen. Jill Reid was due back yesterday. She didn’t turn up. Let’s go, Holland. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover. And very little time.’
In the car, he drew out the maps he had purchased and consulting the sheet of reference points, circled areas.
‘Can you map read, Holland?’
‘Of course. But…’
‘No buts.’ He jabbed his pen so that it made holes in the sheets. ‘One, two, three, four, five. We’ll see what these yield and take it from there.’
He lurched the car into motion. The town fell away behind them. Dappled cows watched their passage with mournful eyes. Sheep grazed, as if grazing would never end. Leo took a deep, uneven breath.
‘I don’t know if this is the best way to find Isabel.’
‘You got a better idea?’ He took a curve too swiftly so that the tires squealed.
‘We could start with that hotel.’
‘We’ll stay there tonight. I want to use what light we have.’
‘You think Jill Reid sent Isabel the list of locations, don’t you?’
He shrugged. ‘Could be.’
‘But when you talked to her, you were looking for Isabel Morgan. And the envelope with the diskette was addressed to Iris Morgenstern.’
He threw her a scalding look.
Leo persisted. ‘What exactly did Jill Reid say to you?’
‘Patience, Holland,’ he growled. ‘I’m just trying to reconstruct it for myself.’
They drove in silence. They were on a single-track road now, like the one Leo had imagined so few hours earlier as the location of Isabel’s ‘accident’. Their view was blocked by the steep hedgerows, but at the first left turn, everything opened up. They were on the edge of a valley. A flat expanse of plane lay beneath them.
‘Not much further now for point one,’ Leo murmured.
A long stretch of metallic wire fencing, some seven foot high, appeared to their right. Beyond it there was a desolate stretch of land, bereft of sheep or cattle or humans. The fence reminded her of the Origen premises outside Oxford, but here, in the distance, there were strange sounds, like cars backfiring.
She was about to say all this to Norfolk, when he shouted, ‘Bingo. Now we’re getting somewhere.’ He slowed the car and pointed to a sign. It warned of Ministry of Defence property.
‘What do you mean we’re getting somewhere? What’s this got to do with anything?’
He didn’t answer immediately. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said at last. He waved the printed sheet of map coordinates in the air. ‘But if any of this has military involvement, it explains Isabel’s secrecy. And that of her informer. Maybe Isabel inadvertently stumbled onto something. There would be little point to all this cloak and dagger, if these map sites simply referred to some of the 400 officially registered testing grounds.’
Icy fingers crept along Leo’s spine. ‘I can’t see what interest the MOD would have in growing experimental foods?’
‘Can’t you?’
She shook her head vigorously, wanting to rid herself of the sudden tingle of fear.
‘They may not be what you and I normally think of as foods - except that they’re grown. They could contain specific toxins or bacteria or contraceptives designed to make certain groups of people infertile. Or slow poisons. Chemical weapons under a different name.’
Leo looked through the stretch of wire mesh which gave the landscape an eerie quality. ‘You’re not to try and go in there now, Norfolk.’
‘No. Keep your eye on the map. We’ll head for the next point.’
‘Have you remembered what Jill Reid said to you?’
He nodded. ‘But maybe it’s taken on a different light in … in the present circumstances. First I just described Isabel to her and she was a little hesitant, as if she couldn’t quite recall her. Then I came out with her name, Isabel, and she relaxed a little, as if she was relieved. Relieved I hadn’t said Morgenstern, perhaps. The undercover name. I put on the broad Aussie and had her laughing, told her Isabel was an old friend and we were a bit worried about her whereabouts, and she kind of consoled me and said she was sure Isabel was fine. With quite a lot of certainty. As if she knew something I didn’t. And I said this was kind of a weird place for Isabel to have been working, given that she was a green from way back, and what kind of work did they do here anyway. She then launched into a riff about antibiotic resistance marker genes, their links to GM stuff in animal feeds. And that’s when we got interrupted.’
He grated fingers through his hair and moved the car into a higher gear. ‘I think she and Isabel were secretly working on something together. But I don’t know what.’
They passed a village of clustered stone which looked as if it were simply a more solid version of the surrounding vegetation. Not far beyond it was their next site. They parked in a muddy lay-by. Norfolk brought out two pairs of Wellies, a small ruck sack, a spade and some planting pots from the bag he had stored in the boot.
He tucked the equipment into the sack while Leo pulled on her boots. ‘If anyone asks, we’re just having ourselves a little ramble. Right?’
She nodded.
The sun peaked out from the covering of clouds. ‘At least the weather’s on our side, Holland.’
For the next few hours, they walked and drove between sites. On two occasions, Norfolk’s surreptitious collection of soil and plantlings was halted by plastic sheathed and electrified obstructions. On two others, they found fields where sheep or cattle grazed peacefully. No planting had taken place and Norfolk wondered aloud whether these were fields for future use or had something to do with feed or drug trials on the animals.
On the whole, they didn’t talk much. Maybe it was the edge of danger which trailed them. Or the aftertaste of death. Leo found her mind returning time and again to that naked body, so waxy in its stillness, cut off too soon from a future. Like her father, all those years ago. Dead. Gone. And she thought about Isabel, trying to muster hope, but she couldn’t prod away her ever-mounting fears.
‘I don’t understand why Isabel would be doing this,’ she stated, anger in her voice, as they got back into the car once again. ‘It makes no sense. And if she were about to embark on something like this, something risky, surely she would have alerted me before heading
off. She’s sensible.’
Norfolk glanced at her, rubbed the back of her neck for a moment, and then switched on the engine. ‘Maybe she couldn’t, Holland. Or maybe she alerted someone we don’t know. Or maybe you just don’t understand her. Her love of risk. Or the nature of her concern, her commitment.’
That, Leo had to acknowledge, if only to herself, was true. She had no real sense as to why Isabel would have taken up this particular cause rather than any other.
There were so many causes, an overwhelming number of causes. The way women were treated in Afghanistan or Saudi, for instance. Or the Albanians in Kossovo. Or the perpetual poverty in Bangladesh. Or the victims of human rights abuses in China or Sri Lanka. Or, closer to, the homeless, the aged, the mentally ill…
Leo mentally ticked off a list and wondered again why Isabel should have focussed her attention on an uncertain campaign which had already received so much publicity - after all, the United States considered GM foods perfectly safe, no different from hybrids. Some 75 million acres were given over to them. Maybe that was it. The anti-GM protest was a new form of anti-Americanism, a reaction against American power. But Isabel didn’t think that way.
Leo could understand the surface reasons, of course. Terminator genes would harm the poorest countries. Modified genes could spread horizontally and affect ordinary plants. Genetically pollute the countryside. Kill birds. Affect animals and humans in unknown ways. Pollution was a bad. But Isabel was hardly a technophobe: her gut reaction wasn’t ever and always to protest at the products that modernity brought with it. She ate meat, she drank whisky and wine. She didn’t pore over labels at supermarkets or drug stores.
And yet, now that Leo considered it, there was a part of Isabel that wished for purity. Particularly of late. Leo thought of the loft with its lack of clutter, its bareness. Nor did Isabel run her own car any longer. But why would a person develop a desire for purity.
Because she felt tainted, Leo concluded.
Something else occurred to her. Isabel liked to dig into the hidden - that’s what her writing was about. And what more secret than these clandestine experiments with transgenic plants, barricaded by the wealth of multinationals? Isabel herself was secretive too, Leo had to acknowledge now that she came to reflect on it. Indeed she thrived on secrets - or was this only a notion triggered by her recent discovery about Jeff and her friend.
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