A Market for Murder Page 8

  ‘Not all women feel a need to fight over a man, you know. Maybe Julie’s got a life of her own? And Sally’s got a little boy. She might have lost interest in men, in the way you mean.’

  ‘OK. But it still feels odd. Wasn’t there something below the surface she wanted us to understand?’

  ‘Drew – she wanted us to help her scotch the rumours, that’s all. She wanted neutral, respectable people like us to take her side and treat her with proper esteem. She’s probably right that if we do that, other people will follow. We should be flattered.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he agreed slowly. ‘But I couldn’t shake off the feeling that she was scared of something. That she had more to worry about than her reputation.’

  ‘Of course she has. Her marriage, for a start. And don’t forget …’ she fixed her dark gaze on him, ‘she was standing inches away from him when that bolt whacked through his neck. I think even I might be a bit scared after that.’

  As she walked up the path to Geraldine Beech’s house, Karen realised she’d been waiting impatiently for this meeting, ever since she’d been told of it. The number of cars parked untidily along the verge outside the house suggested that it was to be very well attended. If all the stallholders from all three farmers’ markets showed up, there could be fourteen or fifteen people. Some brought their partners, too. She was conscious of an urgent need to exchange observations with those who’d been at Bradbourne on Tuesday, and to see if any more sense could be made of Peter Grafton’s death.

  The door was on the latch and she went straight in. A babble of conversation came from the living room, and she joined the group unselfconsciously, immediately catching the eye of Hilary Henderson. The jam-and-honey supplier patted a small area on the couch next to her, and Karen squeezed herself in. Geraldine had brought a motley assortment of chairs and stools into the room, and arranged them in a rough circle. She herself was perched on an incongruously high kitchen stool, almost in the fireplace, surveying the gathering like a Victorian schoolteacher.

  Karen had apparently been the last to arrive. Glancing round the room, she met the eye first of Maggie Withington and then of Oswald Kelly, before encountering two women she knew less well, who only took stalls at other markets. The option existed to participate in one, two or three markets, which operated according to a complicated timetable through the month. Only Maggie, with her highly popular bread, availed herself of all three.

  ‘Thank you all for coming,’ Geraldine began, before Karen could finish assessing the turnout. ‘I know it’s quite a long drive for some of you, and I do appreciate you making the effort. Those of you who weren’t at Bradbourne this week will have heard, of course, that our friend Peter was killed there. It’s partly to give you a chance to talk about this dreadful event that I called this meeting.’

  Sally Dabb wasn’t present, Karen soon realised without surprise. Drew had described her visit to him and Maggs, and she’d been as interested as he was in the woman’s intentions.

  ‘Several of us have been questioned by the police, needless to say,’ Geraldine went on. ‘I don’t suppose any of us have been involved with a murder enquiry before, and it isn’t a very comfortable experience, I’m sure you’ll agree.’ She looked at Maggie and Hilary and Oswald, one by one, leaving Karen feeling she’d been deliberately left out. Could Geraldine be aware that Karen had indeed been involved in murder enquiries before?

  ‘It’s certainly a first for me,’ Oswald agreed, trying to look calm about it. ‘Poor old Peter; never did anybody any harm. Terrible thing to happen.’

  Squashed onto the sofa beside her, Karen heard Hilary give a low tut of irritation.

  Joe Richards, on a narrow spindly looking chair in a far corner, cleared his throat. ‘We must all be suspects, don’t you think?’ he said quietly. Karen gazed at his unruly chestnut hair and threadbare clothes. He might charge the earth for his organic meat, but he never looked as if he had change for 50p about his person. She’d wondered, now and then, just what to make of Joe. On the face of it, he was the most charismatic of all the stallholders, in a romantic, tormented sort of way. Well under forty, with craggy features and abundant hair, he seemed to take the business of food production extremely seriously. He could talk fluently on the injustice of the system which made his prices seem artificially high, when in fact it was the supermarkets who sold meat for unfairly low sums. Karen had often been swayed, listening to him, only to think about it afterwards, and find a number of flaws in his argument. He was also said to be a cheat in a small way. Some of the more challenging regulations associated with organic status could be fudged, and Joe Richards fudged them, by all accounts.

  But what he said now was a shock. ‘No!’ she said, impulsively. ‘It couldn’t have been one of us.’

  Everybody looked at her. ‘Why not?’ Geraldine asked, as if she really wanted to know.

  ‘Because.’ Karen stopped to think. ‘Well. I’m just sure it wasn’t. I saw it.’

  ‘You didn’t see a person with a crossbow, did you?’ Geraldine already knew the answer to that one.

  ‘No,’ Karen admitted. ‘But it was someone in the street, behind my stall. I worked it out with the police this morning. They might have been hiding in the public lavatory. There are windows facing the right way.’

  ‘Ladies or Gents?’ asked Oswald with a snigger.

  ‘Both,’ said Karen.

  ‘We shouldn’t be discussing this,’ Hilary Henderson said, rather loudly.

  ‘That’s right,’ Joe endorsed, with uncomfortable emphasis. ‘We’ll be accused of influencing a material witness.’

  Too late, thought Karen unhappily. Although she liked the loo theory, she’d already allowed a picture into her mind, where one of the stallholders had managed to fire the bolt from the shadowy shrubs, drop the weapon in the foliage, saunter back to their stall, and collect the crossbow later. Anybody apart from Sally Dabb could have done that, if they’d been bold enough. And so could any of the people in the street. The suspect list seemed hopelessly long to her at the moment.

  The police were probably ahead of her. They’d be messing about with trajectories and measuring distances and angles of entry, mainly on the basis of what she’d told them, and the nature of Peter’s wound. And, it hit her now, with a terrible pang, they must include her on their list of possible killers.

  ‘This isn’t really what I wanted to talk about this evening, anyway,’ Geraldine went on. ‘Obviously it’s at the forefront of your minds, and we can’t pretend it didn’t happen, but there is another very urgent matter we need to discuss. Some of you won’t have heard very much about it, and it was in order to ensure that you’re all properly informed that I asked you to come.’

  Karen watched Geraldine closely, suddenly aware that she was one of those still in ignorance. She had no idea what the woman was talking about, but it seemed reasonable to assume that it had a lot to do with the strange secretive utterances of Tuesday evening, when Geraldine had come to her house.

  ‘Don’t tell me SuperFare want to build a new outlet in one of the villages,’ Maggie Withington said, with a forced laugh. Karen was disproportionately pleased to realise that Maggie too was unaware of the mystery.

  Geraldine shook her head. Her untidy hair with the curly ends made her seem girlish. Her weathered skin was flushed a sort of salmon colour. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That particular nightmare hasn’t struck us yet.’

  ‘Then what is it?’ Karen demanded impatiently. ‘What’s all the mystery?’

  ‘Patience,’ murmured Hilary at her shoulder. ‘Don’t spoil her fun.’

  The three people directly opposite Karen, on a row of kitchen chairs, all fixed their attention on Geraldine. A man and two women, none of them very well known to her, all betrayed inside knowledge, in their complacent expressions. ‘They know!’ Karen complained. ‘Evan and Gillian and Freda – look, it’s obvious.’

  ‘Yes, they do,’ Geraldine admitted. ‘They’re all directly affected. In fact it wa
s Evan who first drew my attention to what was happening.’ The man bowed his head in acknowledgement.

  Karen mastered her tongue, and waited. Geraldine clearly needed to control the way the information was disclosed, and impetuous questions were not going to influence her in a favourable direction.

  Maggie Withington had been bouncing on her seat for the past minute or two. ‘It’s about GMO, isn’t it!’ she said excitedly.

  There was a silence for at least three heartbeats. Then Geraldine laughed. ‘Well guessed, Maggie. Clever old you.’

  Karen leant back, with a sense of anticlimax. Was that all? It wasn’t even something new; there’d been genetically modified crops of corn popping up all over the country for years, as the scientists endeavoured to demonstrate that these crops had no effect on the surrounding environment.

  ‘Where is it this time, then?’ Maggie demanded. ‘Where do we meet to grub it all out? I’m game. The idea stinks, however you look at it.’

  ‘It’s not corn this time,’ Evan said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Geraldine nodded. ‘You haven’t managed to guess the whole story. I doubt if anyone could. I only came across it by accident myself. I couldn’t believe it, to begin with.’

  ‘Come on, for heaven’s sake,’ Karen burst out. ‘Stop being so circumspect.’

  Geraldine pursed her lips. ‘It’s not that easy,’ she reproved. ‘There’s a lot of implications we haven’t properly explored. We really don’t know quite how to tackle it.’

  ‘Tell the press,’ said Oswald. ‘That’s the way to do it. Feed them the worst-case scenario and let them have their heads. The whole population’ll rise up and follow us then.’ Karen looked at him with amusement. He was given to poetic turns of phrase that she often found entertaining.

  ‘I agree that publicity would probably be good for us,’ Geraldine said. ‘But I do need to protect my sources, and without disclosing how I know about it, they might not listen.’

  ‘So how do you know about it?’ asked Maggie.

  ‘A friend of a friend, who’s been developing some of the computer software for the people involved. He suddenly realised what some of the data meant, and emailed it to my friend, and she phoned me about it.’

  ‘Sounds very machiavellian,’ remarked Hilary, who’d been uncharacteristically quiet so far. ‘I still think you need much more proof before you take any action.’

  ‘You know what it’s all about then, do you?’ Karen turned awkwardly to meet Hilary’s eye.

  ‘It concerns me,’ Hilary said shortly. ‘Anyone working with fruit needs to be worried.’

  Karen scanned the room quickly. Evan produced apples and plums; Hilary her jams and honey; Gillian had a large holding that grew strawberries and currants.

  ‘Not quite,’ Geraldine corrected Hilary. ‘Only really apples, as far as we know.’

  ‘Peter Grafton made apple juice,’ Karen said, with a sense of foreboding. ‘And Sally uses a lot of apple in her pickles.’

  ‘And I make apple jelly,’ Hilary said. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘OK,’ Karen nodded. ‘So we’re talking about genetically modified apple trees, are we? And you’re all worried that pollen from them will contaminate your own orchards. But wouldn’t it take ages for these new trees to get going and produce fruit? And aren’t apples already modified in every sort of way, with all that grafting and so forth? And there are all those hundreds of varieties to choose from. Why would they bother? What’s the point?’ She was into her stride now, knowing enough to ask sensible questions, but far from expert on the growing of fruit.

  Geraldine answered carefully. ‘We’re not entirely sure about what they think they’re doing, but you can bet it has money at its core.’ Oswald snorted at the pun, which nobody else but Karen seemed to notice. She gave him a comradely giggle, to show she’d spotted it too. Geraldine made a show of forbearance, before continuing. ‘There are various possibilities: getting them to fruit earlier, or for a longer season; slowing the rate of decay; forcing them to inter-pollinate more freely – it could be any of those, or something quite different. And actually, Karen, it only takes a couple of years for a tree to start bearing fruit.’

  ‘And do we know where this is happening?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ Geraldine’s expression was wary, and Karen didn’t believe her. She remembered her visit to the suddenly inhospitable Mary Thomas in Ferngate.

  ‘If I had to guess,’ she said, ‘it would be somewhere not a million miles from Ferngate.’ She watched Geraldine closely for a reaction.

  ‘Guess as much as you like, Miss Clever,’ the woman responded sharply. ‘This is too important to play games with.’

  Karen refused to be crushed. ‘So why are we

  ‘As I said, partly it’s a chance to go over Peter’s death, and air our feelings about that. However you look at it, it was a terrible thing to happen. Poor Julie – her life’s never going to be the same again. And we gather that your husband’s going to be doing the funeral, so that makes you even more closely involved in a way.’

  ‘Closer than actually seeing it happen, you mean?’ Karen grimaced sceptically. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Well, of course that’s true. And it’s all rather soon after the event, I realise now, for any considered reaction.’

  Karen had a sense of the people in the room growing restless. Gillian and Freda, flanked on either side of Evan, had said scarcely a word between them. She thought Gillian sold ordinary vegetables, as well as soft fruit; she didn’t know Freda’s line of business at all. She doubted whether they’d known Peter Grafton very well.

  ‘There’s another reason, then,’ Karen insisted. ‘Something to do with this GM apple business. But instead of just telling it straight, you’ve been beating about the bush and making us guess. Me and Maggie and Oswald and Joe, anyhow. Everyone else seems to be in on the secret.’

  ‘We don’t grow apples, that’s why,’ said Maggie. ‘But we do live close to Ferngate, all four of us.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Geraldine agreed. ‘I’m sorry, Karen. It’s so sensitive, you see. Nobody knows that we know about what’s going on. And in spite of Oswald’s suggestion, I don’t think going to the press just yet would be wise. But it needs to be stopped. Everybody’s very clear about that. I know you’re not officially organic, but it would potentially affect your garden, too. And Joe feeds his animals food-stuff that he grows himself, which is guaranteed GM free. So does Oswald. We can’t afford to let this go on.’

  ‘But apples don’t pollinate with my vegetables or Joe’s corn,’ Karen objected. ‘And I’m not really close to Ferngate. What possible risk can there be?’

  Hilary answered that, pushing herself forward on the sofa, and clasping her hands together. ‘The insects!’ she said forcefully. ‘The pollinators. They eat the stuff, as well as pass it from plant to plant. It could have all sorts of ghastly effects on them. It could wipe them all out, or make them change their habits. The whole thing is so delicately interwoven, you see. Change one element, and it could all come unravelled.’ She spoke with such zeal that Karen’s heart rate sped up at the apocalyptic vision before her. She’d heard it before, many a time, but somehow never felt it like this. And yet, with her rational mind, she still doubted that there was anything to worry about. She still trusted the scientists not to be quite that crazy and irresponsible.

  ‘We have to seek and destroy, in short,’ Oswald put in, with evident relish. ‘And if you’re not with us, you must be against us.’

  ‘Steady on, Ozzie,’ Joe Richards protested from his spindly chair.

  ‘He’s right, though,’ said Maggie bitterly. ‘We’re up against powerful forces here, remember. They’re not going to just stand back and let us trash their life’s work.’

  ‘They’re used to it,’ Hilary said. ‘Monsanto particularly.’

  ‘Is this Monsanto, then?’ Karen asked.

  ‘Apparently not,’ Geraldine said. ‘Although it’s hard to be sure. They
hide behind a host of different names these days. Not that it matters, really. They’re all as bad as each other. And with fickle public attention turned elsewhere, they think they can carry on just as they like.’

  The meeting seemed to run out of steam at this point. Geraldine went off to make coffee, and conversation fragmented into twos and threes. Karen still wasn’t sure she’d grasped the central purpose, although she’d certainly learnt a great deal. She was impatient to get home and share the disclosures with Drew.

  But nobody seemed inclined to leave just yet. Hilary put a hand on her arm, as if sensing her wish to get home. ‘It really does matter, you know,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sure it does.’ Karen felt guilty at her own deficiency in zeal.

  ‘It’s too easy just to assume everything’s going to be all right, you see. I was like that myself a few years ago, so I know how it is. You’ve got Drew and the kids to occupy you, and that wonderful garden you’re making. It’s always busy, with not much time for serious thought, let alone reading the reports that are coming out. But you must. We might not get a second chance.’

  ‘I don’t really understand what you’re asking me to do,’ Karen said.

  Hilary glanced around the room, as if checking that nobody was listening. ‘Divert attention,’ she said in a whisper. ‘The police have been questioning you. You’ve been unlucky – in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like it or not, your name is going to pop up again and again on their computers. They might ask you for opinions on Peter. Just mind what you say. We’ve put so much work into this community …’ her voice rose, ‘… we can’t bear for it all to get ruined now.’

  Karen stared at Hilary’s open country features. ‘But it would never even have occurred to me before this evening that Peter was killed because of food politics.’

  Hilary grinned. ‘Well, we have been silly then, haven’t we?’

  Den suspected that Hemsley was disappointed with the information he’d provided. When it came down to it, all he’d been able to offer was that he knew Karen Slocombe, chief witness to the shooting of Peter Grafton. ‘Is that it?’ Hemsley had demanded, after the all-too-brief explanation. ‘I thought you were going to give me something useful.’