The Ghost Fields (Ruth Galloway) (31 page)

‘I’m glad to catch you all together,’ he says, ‘because I’ve had some interesting news today.’

They are all looking at him now. Judy is sitting in the fireside chair and Nell is next to Chaz, who’s rubbing his eyes, on the sofa. Sally hovers by the door.

‘We’ve had the DNA results on the bones found at the pig farm,’ Nelson goes on. He takes a printout from his pocket. He doesn’t need it really but he feels that the moment deserves a bit of drama. ‘Analysis of the Y-DNA,’ he reads, ‘shows that the dead man had a direct paternal link to George Blackstock junior.’

All eyes turn towards Young George, who blinks rapidly.

‘What does that mean?’ asks Cassie.

‘It means that the man whose bones were found at the farm shares a direct male ancestor with Mr Blackstock, either a father, grandfather or great-grandfather.’

‘How can that be?’ asks Chaz slowly. ‘If he shared a father with Dad, he’d be his brother. It’s like one of those ghastly riddles.’

‘A brother or a cousin,’ says Nelson. ‘We’ve made enquiries in the local area and we believe the remains to be that of Patrick Blackstock, son of Lewis Blackstock.’

Old George stirs in his chair. ‘Son of Lewis?’ he says. ‘But I don’t understand. Lewis is dead. Sally, what’s he saying?’

His daughter-in-law comes over to hold the old man’s hand. ‘I don’t understand either, Dad,’ she says. ‘I think DCI Nelson is saying that Lewis isn’t dead.’

‘He’s dead now,’ says Nelson, ‘but he didn’t die in 1950. He emigrated to Ireland, married and had a son – Patrick. We believe that Patrick attended Fred’s funeral and may have been seen by some of you.’

‘The Ancient Mariner,’ says Blake suddenly. ‘Was he the Ancient Mariner?’

‘The old man that you saw,’ says Nell. ‘The old man with a beard. Was that him?’

‘We believe so,’ says Nelson. ‘His description matches that of a man called Patrick Blackstock who checked into a Bed and Breakfast in Burnham Market on the day before the funeral. He never checked out.’

‘What are you saying?’ says Chaz. ‘That this Patrick chap was killed and one of us did it?’

Interesting, thinks Nelson. Very interesting. ‘Well, he’s certainly dead,’ he says. ‘The rest is still under investigation.’

‘He needn’t have been killed,’ says Cassie. ‘He could have gone to sleep in the barn and been eaten by the pigs. You always say that they could eat a man, Chaz.’

Another interesting insight into Chaz Blackstock’s mind, thinks Nelson.

‘It’s hard to imagine why someone who had a comfortable B & B room waiting for him would go to sleep in a pig pen,’ he says.

‘Maybe he was drunk,’ says Cassie, who seems to be thinking very quickly. ‘And wasn’t that the night of the storm? He could have crept into the barn for shelter.’

‘It’s possible,’ concedes Nelson.

‘But we’ll never know, will we?’ says Chaz, who is becoming louder and more confident. ‘The man’s dead and we’ve only got a few of his bones left. We’ll never know what happened to him.’

‘We’ve got several other lines of enquiry,’ says Nelson. But, in his heart, he knows that Chaz is right. He is sure that Patrick Blackstock was murdered and that the murderer was probably one of his long-lost relatives. But, with no evidence but a few dry bones, it’s going to be impossible to prove. As long as the family stick to their stories, he’ll never find out what happened at Blackstock Hall on the night of the storm. He looks around the room. Apart from Sally and Blake, they are all blood relatives. Old George by the fire, Cassie and Young George with the chessboard between them, Chaz leaning forward pugnaciously, Nell looking troubled. Suddenly they all look very alike. I’ll never be able to break them, he thinks. It’s one of the worst things that can happen on a case, to be sure of what happened but not be able to prove it. He remembers being involved, as a young policeman, in the case of a child who appeared to have been shaken to death. The parents had denied it, had backed each other up, had protested their innocence and, in the end, they had got away with it. Nelson’s friend Sandy Macleod had offered the idea that a bit of carefully directed violence might force a confession. Nelson didn’t go along with the suggestion, though he has sometimes regretted this.

‘The case is ongoing,’ he says now. ‘I’m travelling to Ireland in a few days to meet Patrick Blackstock’s relatives.’

A silence greets this statement. The fire crackles and Old George can be heard saying, ‘Lewis? What happened to Lewis?’

Clough is in a much better mood than his boss. He is enjoying an Indian takeaway brought in by Tim. The smell is so all-pervasive that four nurses have already been into his room, two to complain and two to beg for onion bhajis.

‘This is more like it,’ he says. ‘It’s been years since I had proper food.’

It’s only been six days since your Mexican meal at La Choza, thinks Tim. But he’s glad that his gesture has been appreciated. It was Judy who suggested that a takeaway might be more acceptable than fruit or chocolates and, as usual, she was right.

‘Have some,’ says Clough, pushing a foil container towards Tim.

‘No thanks,’ says Tim. ‘You’re OK. I’m going to the gym after this.’

‘You’re always at that gym,’ says Clough. ‘It’s an obsession.’

‘What about you and football?’

‘You know what they say,’ says Clough. ‘Football’s not a matter of life and death, it’s more important than that.’

There’s a brief pause and then Tim says, ‘You seem to be a lot better. When do they say you can go home?’

‘Tomorrow or the next day,’ says Clough, spearing a cube of chicken tikka with a plastic fork. ‘I’m a medical miracle.’

‘When will you be back at work?’ asks Tim. ‘Not that we miss you or anything. Tanya hasn’t enjoyed herself so much in years. She’ll be after the boss’s job next.’

‘Oh, I’ll be back in a few days,’ says Clough. ‘It’d take more than a stab wound in the chest to keep me away.’

CHAPTER 29

Nelson travels to Ireland the next day. Although his mother, Maureen, is a proud Irishwoman, this is the first time that he has visited the land of his ancestors. Patrick lived in Belfast, which Maureen would have considered suspicious for a start, but Nelson is surprised to find himself in a vibrant and attractive city; his taxi takes him past a mix of old and new buildings, a bustling waterfront and enough shopping centres to satisfy even Michelle. The taxi driver keeps up an apparently endless flow of talk, informing Nelson, in a pleasantly dry brogue, that the
Titanic
was built in Belfast (not a good omen) and that there’s a Bronze Age henge called The Giant’s Ring just outside the city. This connection to North Norfolk makes Nelson feel nervous, as does the driver’s road sense, which is even worse than his.

The taxi drops Nelson at Belfast School of Art, where Patrick was a teacher. It’s a glassy modern campus in the middle of the oldest part of town. He has to concede that his image of Belfast, constructed almost entirely from his memories of the Troubles in the seventies and eighties, is nothing like the reality. This is a proper city and he feels his urban spirits rise.

He is meeting a woman called Alice O’Brien, described as Patrick’s closest friend amongst the faculty.

‘It’s good of you to see me,’ he says. ‘I know you must be very busy.’ He says this because Ruth is always telling him how hard university lecturers work.

‘I wanted to help,’ says Alice. ‘I was very fond of Patrick. It’s hard to believe that he’s gone.’

People have a problem saying ‘dead’, thinks Nelson. He understands this but the euphemisms make him nervous sometimes. If someone has just fallen asleep, why the hell are they burying them?

Alice is an attractive woman in her fifties. She has long hair, black streaked with grey, and it suits her. Michelle always says that she’s going to cut her hair short when she reaches fifty. Nelson hopes this isn’t true.

‘How long had you known Patrick?’ asks Nelson.

‘Almost fifteen years. Ever since he came to work here. We got on from the first. He was an artist, I’m a writer.’ She waves vaguely at the books on the shelf behind her. Nelson remembers that Alice O’Brien teaches creative writing. So you can get degrees in that now. Jesus wept.

He wants to ask about the nature of the relationship between Alice and Patrick but before he can frame the question, Alice volunteers that their friendship was ‘purely platonic’.

‘I don’t think Patrick was that way inclined.’

‘You mean he was gay?’

‘No,’ says Alice. ‘He was an aesthete, a loner. I don’t think he had relationships with men or women.’

‘What do you know about his family?’

‘He was an only child. His mother died when he was in his twenties. Patrick was very close to his father, though; he cared for him until he died.’

‘Did you ever meet his father?’

‘A couple of times. He was very old when I knew him and in the early stages of dementia, but he was always very sweet to me.’

These sweet, gentle Blackstocks are a different breed from the family Nelson knows. He wonders if Lewis Blackstock was suffering from dementia or whether he’d been unhinged by the sights he saw in the war. Either way, it was clear that his son was a devoted carer.

‘Lewis died in 2003,’ says Nelson. ‘Is that right?’

‘I think so. It would have been about ten years ago.’

‘Did he ever talk to you about his wider family?’ asks Nelson. ‘About the Blackstocks?’

‘No,’ says Alice. ‘I knew they were from Norfolk but that was all. I didn’t even realise that he had relatives left there. But you say he attended a family funeral?’

‘Yes. It was the funeral of Patrick’s uncle – Lewis’s brother – who died in the war. He was in the air force and his plane crashed. His body was only found recently.’ He realises that this summary leaves out rather a lot of the story.

‘It’s possible that Patrick read about the find in the papers,’ Nelson goes on. ‘There was quite a lot of publicity at the time. We found a guidebook to Norfolk amongst his belongings. He’d marked the page about Blackstock Hall, the family house.’

‘Blackstock Hall? Is it a proper stately home then?’

‘It’s a large house,’ says Nelson. ‘I wouldn’t say it was stately exactly.’

‘And there are Blackstocks still living there?’

‘Oh yes,’ says Nelson. ‘Including Lewis’s younger brother George, who’s in his late eighties. Did the old man never mention them?’

‘He did say something once,’ says Alice. ‘But I dismissed it at the time because, as I say, he was apt to get a bit confused.’

‘What did he say?’ asks Nelson. ‘Can you remember?’

Alice is silent for a moment, looking into the distance. There’s a poster over her desk showing a girl floating in water, flowers all around her. The walls of Nelson’s office are full of flow charts and performance targets but if he had space for a picture, he would pick something a bit jollier.

‘We were talking about the place where the two rivers meet,’ says Alice at last. ‘That’s where the name Belfast comes from, Beal Feirste, it means river mouth. Anyway, I was saying that there’s all sorts buried in the silt there – going back to prehistoric times – and Lewis said, “Where I come from, the land is red with blood.”’

‘Is that all?’ says Nelson. ‘“Where I come from, the land is red with blood”?’

‘Yes. I had no idea what he meant but it stuck in my mind. It’s such an arresting phrase.’

But I’m not making any arrests, thinks Nelson, as the taxi takes him back to the airport. The visit hasn’t taught him much, except that Patrick Blackstock was a kind, gentle man who looked after his father. The father who had walked out on his family fifty years ago and never once looked back. The man who said that he came from a land ‘red with blood’. Did this refer to Norfolk’s history – all that prehistoric stuff that Ruth’s always coming out with – or did he mean something more specific? Was he referring to his mother’s belief that the land was cursed? Lewis’s mother, Nelson remembers, killed herself some years after her son’s disappearance. Did Lewis ever know this? Would it have made a difference?

Nelson has contacted Patrick’s solicitor, who told him that his client’s will left his pictures to Alice and everything else to Alzheimer’s research. So maybe Lewis really did have dementia. It occurs to him that Patrick won’t ever get old enough to have Alzheimer’s.