June 30 6 page

“THERE’LL BE TWENTY pallets’ worth by three o’clock tomorrow, see,” comes a man’s voice from the office down the hall, “and if your truck isn’t here at one minute past three, then the lot’ll be going to the Fine Fare depot in Aylesford.” He hangs up and adds, “Lying twat.” By now I’ve recognized Mr. Harty from my phone call this morning. The door behind me flies open and an older woman in stained overalls, green wellies, and a spotted neckerchief thing sort of shoos me on. “Chop suey, young lady, the doctor will see you now. Mush-mush. New picker, yes? Of course you are.” She bustles me forwards into a poky office smelling of potatoes in a sack. There’s a desk, a typewriter, a phone, filing cabinets, a poster with GLORIOUS RHODESIA on it and photos of wildlife, and a view of a farmyard and a decomposing tractor. Gabriel Harty’s in his sixties, has a low-tide sort of face and hair tufting out of his nose and ears. Ignoring me, he tells the woman, “Bill Dean was just on the blower. Wanted to discuss ‘a distribution niggle.’ ”

“Let me guess,” says the woman. “His drivers have all got bubonic plague, so could we run tomorrow’s strawberries over to Canterbury.”

“Ye-es. Know what else he said? ‘I wish you landowners would try to help the rest of us.’ Landowner. The bank owns the land and the land owns you. That’s what being a landowner means. He’s the one taking his family to the Seychelles, or wherever it is.” Mr. Harty relights his pipe and stares out of the window. “Who are you?”

I follow his gaze to the dead tractor until I realize he means me. “I’m the new picker.”

“New picker, is it? Not sure if we need any more.”

“We spoke on the phone this morning, Mr. Harty.”

“A long time ago, this morning. Ancient history.”

“But …” If I don’t have a job here, what’ll I do?

The woman looks over from the filing cabinet: “Gabriel.”

“But we’ve already got this—this Holly Benson-Hedges girl on her way. She rang up this morning.”

“That’s me,” I tell him, “but it’s Holly Rothmans and …” Hang on, is he being funny? He’s got one of those faces where you can’t tell. “That’s me.”

“That was you, was it?” Mr. Harty’s pipe makes a death-rattle noise. “That’s lucky, that is. Then we’ll see you tomorrow at six, sharp. Not two minutes past six. No. Nobody sleeps in, we’re not a holiday camp. Now. I have more telephone calls to make.”

“THE PLACE IS rather deserted on Sundays,” says Mrs. Harty, as we walk back across the farmyard. She’s posher than her husband and I wonder what their story is. “Most of our Kentish pickers go home on Sundays for a few creature comforts, and the student mob have decamped to the beach at Leysdown. They’ll be back by evening, unless they get waylaid at the Shurland Arms. So: The shower’s over there, the loo’s down there, and there’s the laundry room. Where did you say you’ve come from today?”

“Oh, just …” Sheba dashes up and runs happy rings round us, which gives me longer to get my story straight “… Southend. I just took my O levels last month. My parents are busy working and I want to save a bit of money, and a friend of a friend worked here a couple of summers ago, so my dad said okay, now I’m sixteen, so …”

“So here you are. Is it sayonara to school?”

Sheba follows a scent trail behind a pile of tires.

“Will you be going back to do A levels, Holly?”

“Oh, right. Depends on my results, I s’pose.”

Satisfied, and not that interested, Mrs. Harty leads me into the brick barn through the wide-open wooden door. “Here’s where most of the lads sleep.” Twenty or so metal beds are arranged in two rows, like in a hospital but with barn walls, a stone floor, and no windows. What I think of sleeping among a bunch of snoring, farting, wanking guys must show on my face, ’cause Mrs. Harty says, “Don’t worry—we knocked some partitions up this spring,” she points to the end, “to give the ladies some privacy.” The last third of the barn’s walled off to a height of two men or so with a plywood partition thing. It’s got a doorway with an old sheet across it. Someone’s chalked THE HAREM above the doorway, which someone’s drawn an arrow from to the words SIZE DOES MATTER GARY SO DREAM ON. Through the sheet, it’s a bit darker, and like a changing room in a clothes shop, with three partitions on either side, each with its own doorway, two beds, plus a bare electric bulb dangling from the rafters. If Dad was here he’d wince and mutter about health and safety regs, but it’s warm and dry and safe enough. Plus there’s another door in the barn wall with an inside bolt, so if there was a fire you could get out in time. Only thing is, all the beds look taken with a sleeping bag, a backpack, and stuff, until we get to the last cubicle, the only one with the light on. Mrs. Harty knocks on the door frame and says, “Knock-knock, Gwyn.”

A voice inside answers, “Mrs. Harty?”

“I’ve brought you a roommate.”

Inside, the Welsh dungaree-wearing smirker is sitting cross-legged on her bed, writing in a diary or something. Steam’s rising from a flask on the floor, and smoke from a cigarette balanced on a bottle. Gwyn looks at me and gestures at the bed, like, It’s all yours. “Welcome to my humble abode. Which is now our humble abode.”

“Well, I’ll leave you two girls to it,” says Mrs. Harty, and goes, and Gwyn gets back to her diary. Well, that’s bloody nice, that is. F’Chrissakes, she could try to make a bit of small talk. Scratty scrat-scrat goes her Biro. Probably writing ’bout me right now, and probably in Welsh, so I can’t read it. Well, if she’s not talking to me, I’m not talking to her. I dump my duffel bag on the bed, ignoring a Stella Yearwood–sounding voice saying that Holly Sykes’s great bid for freedom has ended in a total shit-hole. I lie next to my duffel bag ’cause I’ve got nowhere else to go and no energy. My feet feel well and truly Black & Deckered. I don’t have a sleeping bag, either.

MY GOALIE WHACKS the ball clean down the table and, slam!, straight into Gary the student’s goal and the impressed onlookers cheer. Brendan calls that shot my Peter Shilton Special, and used to whinge ’bout my left-handed goalie’s unfair advantage. Five-nil to me, my fifth victory in a row, and we’re playing winner stays on. “She bloody demolished me, what can I say?” says Gary, his face fiery and speech slurred after a few Heinekens. “Holly, you’re a progeny, no, a progidy, thassit, a prodigy, a bona fide bar-football prodigy—and there’s no dishonor in losing to … one of them.” Gary does a pantomime bow and reaches over the table with his can of Heineken so that I have to clink mine against his. “How d’you get to be so good?” asks this girl who’s easy to remember ’cause she’s Debby from Derby. I just shrug and say I always used to play at my cousin’s. But I remember Brendan saying, “I cannot believe I’ve been beaten by a girl,” which I’ve only just realized he said to make my victory sweeter.

I’ve had enough bar football for now, so I go out for a smoke. The common room’s the old stables and it still whiffs a bit of horse poo, but it’s livelier than the Captain Marlow on a Sunday night. Must be twenty-five pickers sat round the tables yacking, snacking, smoking, drinking, flirting, and playing cards, and although there’s no telly someone’s got a paint-spattered ghetto blaster and a Siouxsie and the Banshees tape. Outside, the fields of Black Elm Farm slope down to the sea, and lights dot-to-dot the coast past Faversham, past Whitstable, and further. You’d never believe it’s a world where people get murdered or mugged or kicked out by their mothers.

It’s nine P.M.; Mam’ll be saying “Lights out and God bless” to Jacko and Sharon, then pouring herself a glass of wine and watching Bergerac on the telly. Or maybe tonight she’ll go downstairs to bitch about me to one of her supergrasses: “I don’t know where I went wrong with that one, so help me, God, I don’t.” Dad’ll be telling Nipper the plumber and TJ the sparky and old Mr. Sharkey, “It’ll all come out in the wash,” or something else that sounds wise but means nothing.

I get my box of Rothmans out of my shirt pocket—eight gone, twelve left—but before I can light up Gary appears in his REALITY IS AN ILLUSION CAUSED BY A LACK OF ALCOHOL T-shirt and offers me one of his Silk Cut, saying, “This one’s on me, Holly.” I thank him and he says, “You won it fair and square,” and his eyes flicker up and down my chest, like Vinny’s do. Did. Gary’s ’bout to say something else but one of his mates calls him over, and Gary says, “I’ll see you later,” and goes. Not if I see you first, I think. I’ve had it with boys.

Three-quarters of the pickers are students at college or uni or waiting to go this September, and I’m the youngest by a couple of years, even counting my age as sixteen, not fifteen. I’m trying not to act all shy, ’cause that might give my age away, but they aren’t going to be plumbers or hairdressers or bin collectors: They’ll be computer programmers or teachers or solicitors, and it shows. It’s in how they speak. They use precise words, like they own them, like Jacko does, in fact, but not like any kid in my year at school’d dare to. Ed Brubeck’ll be one of them in two years. I look over at Gary and just at that moment he sort of senses me and gives me a fancy-meeting-you-here look, and I glance away before he gets the wrong idea.

The pickers who aren’t students sort of stand out. Gwyn’s one. She’s playing draughts with Marion and Linda and, apart from a “Hi” and a fake smile when I came in, she’s ignored me. Cheers very much, Gwyn. Marion’s a bit simple and her sister Linda fusses all mummishly and finishes her sentences for her. Picking fruit at Black Elm Farm’s their annual holiday, sort of. There’s a couple, Stuart and Gina, who have their own tent, tucked away in a dip. They’re late twenties, look like folk singers, with earrings, and hair in pony-tails, and actually they are amateur folk singers, and busk in market towns. Gina’s taking me and Debby food shopping to the Spar at Eastchurch after I’ve been paid. They act as go-betweens to the other pickers and Mr. Harty, Debby told me. Last, there’s a kid called Alan Wall, who sleeps in a tiny caravan parked round the side of the farmhouse. I saw him hanging out washing to dry when I was having a look around. He can’t be more than a year or two older than me, but his scrawny body’s tough as cables and he’s tanned like tea. Debby told me he’s a gypsy, or a traveler, as you’re s’posed to say these days, and that Mr. Harty hires someone from his family every year, but Debby didn’t know if it’s a tradition or debt or superstition, or what.

COMING BACK FROM the toilet, I see a narrow canyon between the farmhouse and a shed. Someone’s waiting. A match strikes. “Fancy meeting you here,” says Gary. “Care for another smoke?”

Yes, Gary’s good-looking, but he’s at least a bit drunk, and I’ve known him all of two hours. “I’ll get back to the common room, thanks.”

“Nah, you’ll share a smoke with me. Go on, Hol, everyone’s got to die of something.” He’s already stuck his box of Silk Cuts in my face with one stuck out for me to take with my lips. I can’t refuse without making it into a big issue so I use my fingers and say, “Thanks.”

“Here’s a light … So tell me. Your boyfriend in Southend must be missing you something rotten.”

I think of Vinny and heave out a “Christ, no,” think, You idiot, Sykes, and add, “Kind of, yeah, he is, actually.”

“Glad that’s sorted.” In the glow of his fag, Gary grins dead slinkily. “Let’s go for a stroll and see the stars. Tell me about Mr. Christ-no-sort-of-yeah.”

I really don’t want Gary’s fingers inside my bra or anywhere else, but how do I tell him to piss off without bruising his pride?

“Shyness is cute,” says Gary, “but it stops you living. C’mon, I’ve got alcohol, nicotine … anything else you might need.”

Christ, if guys could be girls being hit on by guys, just for one night, lines as cheesy as that’d go extinct. “Look, Gary, now’s not a good time.” I try to walk around him to get back to the farmyard.

“You’ve been eyeing me up.” His arm comes down like a carpark barrier, pressing against my stomach. I smell his aftershave, his beer, and his horniness, sort of. “All night. Now’s your chance.”

If I tell him to feck right off, he’ll probably turn all the pickers against me. If I go nuclear and call for help it’ll be his version against the Hysterical New Girl’s, and how old is she again, and do her parents really know she’s here anyway?

“Polish your mating rituals, Octopus Boy,” says a Welsh voice. Me and Gary both jump a mile. It’s Gwyn. “Your seductions look very like muggings to me.”

“We were—we were—we were just talking.” Gary’s already scuttling away to the common room. “That’s all.”

“Annoying but harmless.” Gwyn watches him go. “Like mouth ulcers. He’s propositioned every female on the farm except Sheba.”

Being rescued’s humiliating and what comes out is a grumpy “I can look after myself.”

Gwyn says, a bit too sincerely, “Oh, I don’t doubt that.”

Is she taking the piss? “I could’ve handled him.”

“You don’t half remind me of me, Holly.”

How do you answer that? “Up the Junction” by Squeeze booms from the ghetto-blaster. Gwyn stoops. “Look, Octopus Boy dropped his ciggies.” She lobs them my way and I catch the box. “Hand them back or keep them as compensation for harassment. Your call.”

I imagine Gary’s version of this. “He’ll hate me now.”

“He’ll be scared shitless you’ll tell everyone what a horse’s arse he made of himself. Rejection makes lads like our Gaz feel four feet tall and two inches long, full size. Anyhow, I came to say I borrowed a sleeping bag off Mrs. Harty for you. God only knows how many previous owners it’s had, but it’s been washed so the stains aren’t sticky at least, and the barn can get chilly at night. I’m turning in, so if I’m asleep before you, sweet dreams. The hooter goes at five-thirty.”

July 2

MY PERIOD’S ONLY A FEW DAYS LATE, so I don’t see how I can be pregnant, so what’s this belly doing, or this blue-veined third boob pushing out below my normal two, which Vinny named Dolly and Parton? Mam is not taking the news well and doesn’t believe that I don’t know who the father is: “Well, someone put the baby inside you! We both know you’re not the Virgin Mary, don’t we?” But I really don’t know. Vinny’s the chief suspect, but am I quite sure nothing happened with Ed Brubeck in the church? Or Gary at Black Elm Farm, or even Alan Wall the gypsy? When you know your memory’s been monkeyed around with once, how can you ever be sure of any memory again? Smoky Joe’s old moo glares over her copy of the Financial Times: “Ask the baby. It ought to know.”

Everyone starts chanting, “Ask the baby! Ask the baby!” and I try to say I can’t, it hasn’t been born yet, but it’s like my mouth’s stitched up, and when I look at my belly it’s grown. Now it’s a sort of massive skin tent that I’m attached to. The baby’s lit red inside, like when you shine a torch through your hand, and it’s as big as a naked grown-up. I’m afraid of it.

“Ask it, then,” hisses Mam.

So I ask it, “Who’s your dad?”

We wait. It swivels its head my way and speaks in a badly synched-up voice from a hot place: When Sibelius is smashed into little pieces, at three on the Day of the Star of Riga, you’ll know I’m near …

• • •

… and the dream caves in. Relief, a sleeping bag, brothy darkness, I’m not pregnant, and a Welsh voice is whispering, “It’s okay, Holly, you were dreaming, girl.”

Our plywood partition, in a barn, on a farm; what was her name? Gwyn. I whisper back, “Sorry if I woke you.”

“I’m a light sleeper. Sounded nasty. Your dream.”

“Yeah … Nah, just stupid. What time is it?”

The light on her watch is mucky gold. “Five-and-twenty to five.”

Most of the night’s gone. Is it worth trying to go back to sleep?

A big fat zoo of snorers is snoring in all different rhythms.

I feel a stab of homesickness for my room at home, but I stab my homesickness back. Remember the slap.

“You know, Holly,” Gwyn’s whisper rustles the sheets of the dark, “it’s tougher than you think out there.”

That’s a weird thing to say and a weird time to say it. “If that lot can do it,” I mean the students, “I bloody know I can.”

“Not fruit picking. The running-away-from-home deal.”

Quick, deny it. “What makes you think I’ve run away?”

Gwyn ignores this, like a goalie ignoring a shot going a mile wide. “Unless you know for a fact, a fact, that going back’ll get you …” she sort of sighs, “… damaged, I’d say go back. When the summer’s gone, and your money’s gone too, and Mr. Richard Gere hasn’t pulled up on his Harley-Davidson and said, ‘Hop on,’ and you’re fighting for a place by the bins behind McDonald’s at closing time, then, whatever Gabriel Harty says to the contrary, you will think of Black Elm Farm as a five-star hotel. You make a list, see. It’s called ‘All the Things I’ll Never, Ever Do to Get By.’ The list stays exactly the same, but its name changes to ‘All the Things I’ve Had to Do to Get By.’ ”

I keep my voice calm. “I’m not running away.”

“Then why the false name?”

“My name is Holly Rothmans.”

“And mine’s Gwyn Aquafresh. Fancy a squirt of toothpaste?”

“Aquafresh isn’t a surname. Rothmans is.”

“That’s true enough, but I bet you a pack of Benson & Hedges it’s not yours. Don’t get me wrong, a false name’s clever. I changed mine often, in my first few months away. But all I’m saying is, if you’re weighing possible trouble ahead against the trouble you’ve left behind, times the ‘ahead’ trouble by twenty.”

It’s appalling she’s seen through me so easily. “Too early for Thoughts for the Day,” I growl. “Good night.”

The first bird of the morning starts twittering.

AFTER I’VE WASHED down three peanut-butter-and-Digestive-biscuit sandwiches with a glass of water we head out to the big south field, where Mrs. Harty and her husband’re putting up a big tent thing. It’s cool and dewy but another sticky day’s ahead, I reckon. I don’t hate Gwyn or anything, but it’s like she saw me naked and I’m not sure how to meet her eyes, so I stick with Marion and Linda. Gwyn seems to understand and she’s picked a row next to Stuart and Gina, and Alan Wall, ten rows or so away, so we couldn’t talk now even if we wanted to. Gary acts like I’m totally invisible and is working on the far side of the students. Suits me.

Strawberry picking’s boring work, sure, but it’s calming, too, compared to bar work. It’s nice being out in the open air. There’s birds, and sheep, and the sound of a tractor somewhere, and the students’ chattering, though that dies away after a bit. We’ve each got a cardboard tray with twenty-five punnets in, and our job’s to fill each punnet with ripe strawberries, or nearly ripe. You snip through the stalk with your thumbnail, put the berry in the punnet, and on you go like that. I start off squatting on my haunches but it murders my calves so I kneel on the straw as I go along. Wish I’d brought a looser pair of jeans, or shorts. If a strawberry’s a bit overripe and mushes in my fingers, I lick the fruity smear, but it’d be stupid to scoff the perfect ones ’cause that’s like eating your own wages. When all the punnets are full, you carry the tray to the tent, where Mrs. Harty weighs it. If it’s on or over the right weight she pays you a plastic token, otherwise you have to go back to your row for a few more strawbs to bring it up to weight. Linda says at three o’clock we all troop back to the office to swap the tokens for money, so you keep your tokens safe: no token, no money.

Once we get going, it’s pretty obvious who’s used to field-working: Stuart and Gina move up their rows twice as fast as the rest of us, and Alan Wall’s even faster. Some of the students are a bit crap, which means I’m not the slowest at least. The sun gets higher and stronger and now I’m glad I’ve got Ed Brubeck’s cap to shield the back of my neck. An hour goes by and I’ve sort of slipped into autopilot. The punnets fill, strawberry by strawberry by strawberry, and my earnings go up, 2 p by 5 p by 10 p. I keep thinking ’bout what Gwyn said this morning. Sounds like she’s learned a lot of bad stuff the hard way. I think about Jacko and Sharon eating breakfast with my empty chair there, like I’ve died or something. Bet Mum’s all, “I refuse to even discuss that young mademoiselle, I do.” She sounds really Irish when she’s angry or wound up. I think about pinball, and how being a kid’s like being shot up the firing lane and there’s no veering left or right; you’re just sort of propelled. But once you clear the top, like when you’re sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen, suddenly there’s a thousand different paths you can take, some amazing, others not. Tiny little differences in angles and speed’ll totally alter what happens to you later, so a fraction of an inch to the right, and the ball’ll just hit a pinger and a dinger and fly down between your flippers, no messing, a waste of 10 p. But a fraction to the left and it’s action in the play zone, bumpers and kickers, ramps and slingshots and fame on the high-score table. My problem is, I don’t know what I want, apart from a bit of money to buy food later on today. Until the day before yesterday all I wanted was Vinny, but I won’t make that mistake again. Like a shiny silver pinball whizzing out of the firing lane, I’ve not got the faintest bloody clue where I’m going or what’ll happen next.

• • •

AT EIGHT-THIRTY WE break for sweet, milky tea, served in the tent by a woman with a Kent accent thicker than the Earth’s crust. You’re s’posed to have your own mug but I’m using an old marmalade jar fished out of the kitchen bin, which raises a few eyebrows but it gives my tea an orangy tang. Gary the student’s Benson & Hedges are stashed in my Rothmans box, and I smoke a couple; they’re that bit toastier than Rothmans. Linda shares her packet of Custard Creams with me, and Marion says, “Picking’s hungry work,” in her flat, bunged-up voice, and I say, “Yeah, it is, Marion,” and Marion’s really happy, and I wish her life could be easier than it’s going to be. Then I go over to where Gwyn’s sitting with Stuart and Gina and offer her a fag, and she says, “Don’t mind if I do, thanks,” and we’re friends again; it’s that simple. Blue sky, fresh air, aching back but three pounds richer than I was when I picked my first strawberry. At eight-fifty, we start picking again. At school right now, Miss Swann our form teacher’ll be taking the register, and when she reads out my name, there’ll be no reply. “She’s not here, miss,” someone’ll say, and Stella Yearwood should start to sweat, if she’s got half a brain, which she has. If she’s bragged about nicking my boyfriend, people’ll guess why I’m not at school, and sooner or later the teachers’ll hear and Stella’s going to get summoned to Mr. Nixon’s office. Maybe a copper’ll be there too. If she’s kept schtum about nicking Vinny, she’ll be acting all cool like she knows nothing but she’ll be panicking inside. So’ll Vinny. Sex with a bit of young fluff’s all well and good, I s’pose, as long as nothing goes wrong, but things’ll look pretty different pretty quickly if I stay at Black Elm Farm for a couple more days. Suddenly I’m an underage schoolgirl whom Vincent Costello seduced with presents and alcohol for four weeks before she vanished without a trace; and Vincent Costello, twenty-five-year-old car salesman of Peacock Street, Gravesend, becomes a chief suspect. I’m not an evil person or anything, and I don’t want Jacko or Dad or Sharon to lose sleep over me, specially Jacko, but putting Vinny and Stella through the mangle at least a bit is very, very tempting …

WHEN I CARRY my next full tray over to Mrs. Harty’s tent, everyone’s crowding round the radio looking dead serious—Mrs. Harty and the tea lady both look horrified—and for a horrible moment I think that I’ve been announced missing already. So I’m almost relieved when Derby Debby tells me that three bodies have been found. I mean, murder’s awful, of course, but bodies are always being found on the news and it never actually affects you. “Where?” I ask.

“Iwade,” says Stuart, of Stuart and Gina.

I’ve never heard of it, so I ask, “Where’s that?”

“ ’Bout ten miles away,” says Linda. “You’d’ve passed by it yesterday. It’s just off the main road to the Kingsferry Bridge.”

“Shush,” someone says, and the radio’s cranked up: “A police spokesman has confirmed that Kent police are treating the deaths as suspicious, and urge anyone who may possess information relating to the deaths to contact Faversham Police Station, where an inquiry room is being set up to coordinate the investigation. Members of the public are urged not to—”

“My God,” blurts out Derby Debby, “there’s a murderer about!”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” says Mrs. Harty, turning down the volume. “Just because something’s on the radio doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“Three dead bodies is three dead bodies,” says Alan Wall the gypsy. “Nobody’s made them up.” I haven’t heard him speak till now.

“But it doesn’t follow that Jack the Ripper Mark Two’s roaming the Isle of Sheppey with a meat cleaver, does it? I’ll make some inquiries from the office. Maggs here,” Mrs. Harty nods at the tea lady, “will be in charge.” Off she strides.

“That’s all right, then,” says Debby. “Sherlock Harty’s on the case. But I’ll tell you this: Unless there’s a lock as thick as my arm on the barn door tonight, I’m off, and she can drive me to the station.”

Someone asks if the radio said how the people’d been killed, and Stuart answers that the exact words were “a violent and brutal attack,” which sounded more like sharp objects than guns, but nobody could be sure at this point. So we may as well get back to work for the time being, ’cause we’re safest in the open air with lots of people about.

“Sounds to me like a love-triangle thing,” says Gary the student. “Two men, one girl. Classic crime of passion.”

“Sounds to me like a drug deal gone wrong,” says Gary’s mate.

“Sounds to me like you’re both talking out your arses,” says Debby.

ONCE THE THOUGHT gets into your head that a psycho might be hiding in that huddle of trees at the end of the field, or over there in that hedgerow, figures start appearing in the corners of your eyes. Like the Radio People you quarter-see instead of half-hear. I think about the timing of the murders; who’s to say it didn’t happen just as I was walking only a field or two away to the Kingsferry Bridge? S’pose it was that cyclist I met, driven mad by grief for his son? He didn’t look like a psycho, but who does, in real life? Or how about those boyfriends and girlfriends in the VW camper van? As we’re having lunch—Gwyn’s made me cheese and Branston sandwiches and gives me a banana ’cause she’s worked out my food situation—we spot a helicopter over where the bridge is, and on the one o’clock news Radio Kent’s saying that a forensic team’s arrived at the bungalow, and they’ve tracker dogs and everything there. The police still haven’t issued the names of the victims, but Mrs. Harty knows the local farmer’s wife and apparently the bungalow’s lived in at the weekends by a young woman called Heidi Cross. She studies in London during the week, and it looks like the dead woman’s her. There’s a rumor that Heidi Cross and her boyfriend were into “radical politics” so now Gary the student’s saying it was a political hit, possibly sponsored by the IRA or the CIA, if they were anti-American, or maybe MI5 if the couple were pro–coal miner.

I thought universities only let you in if you’re dead brainy, but I sort of want to believe Gary, too, ’cause it’d mean there wasn’t a random psycho hiding behind the haystacks, an idea I can’t quite shake.

We put in another couple of hours after lunch, and when we’ve finished we traipse back to the office, where Mrs. Harty changes our tokens into cash. I earned over fifteen pounds today. Back at the barn where we sleep, Gabriel Harty’s fitting a lock onto the inside of the barn door, just like Derby Debby wanted. Obviously our employer can’t have all his pickers deserting while the strawberries ripen and rot on the plants. Gwyn tells me that normally a bunch of pickers all walk into Leysdown for food shopping and a bevvy or two, but today it’s only the students with cars who’ve gone. I’ll save my money, and dinner can be a bowl of muesli, from the leftovers cupboard, and the last of the Ritz biscuits, plus Gwyn’s promised to give me a hot dog. Her and me then sit smoking in the warm shade of the crumbling wall on a grassy bank by the farm entrance. From where we’re sitting we can see Alan Wall hanging up washing on a line. His top’s bare and he’s all muscled and coppery and blond, and Gwyn fancies him, I reckon. He’s unflappable, only speaks when there’s something worth saying, and he’s not worried by a murderer in the undergrowth. Gwyn’s pretty laid-back about the murders, too: “If you’d just bludgeoned three people to death yesterday, would you go to an island that’s as flat as a pancake less than a mile away, where strangers stick out like a three-headed Adolf Hitler? I mean …”

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 625