In the morning he found there was nothing in the cupboard but bread, butter, a splash of milk and half a packet of maggoty old flour – and there was no water in the tap. Hot or cold. Then he saw the shiny new galvanised steel bucket below the kitchen sink and realised that drawning water from a well probably went with cooking on bottled gas and pissing in an earth closet.
He went into the yard and prised up the wooden lid of the well. He’d done nothing like this since before the war. A gardener’s cottage on his father’s estate. An old boy who refused all the new-fangled gadgetry that his father would have installed in 1930 – water in taps, a bog that flushed, electricity. The old boy had lived all his life thirty-odd miles from London and never been there. In his retirement he had raised the lushest garden Troy had ever seen, so rich, so colour-crammed, Fitz would have been chlorophyll green with envy – head-high delphiniums in palest blue, tiny tulips in darkest black, and the mottled, browning greens of foul, fug-making homegrown tobacco, strung out in late summer to dry – and he knew the proper names of none of his blooms, no more than he knew the real names of half the creatures of the garden. One word had lodged in Troy’s mind for ever: the old boy had called snails ‘hodmandods’, a word peculiar to the dialects of eastern England. ‘Hodmandod,’ thought Troy, as he saw one of the creatures slide up the inner wall of the well.
Perhaps Tara was right. Perhaps he laboured under an habitual fancy of being a rustic. Even as he thought the mundane thought he heard the crash of conkers in their spiky shells hitting the ground, looked up to see crows conspiratorially perched on the barn ridge, and a fighter formation of Canada geese, gently flapping southward, watched a black-stained, mildewed sycamore leaf float slowly down, and smelt the unmistakable cheesy, rotten smell of Phallus impudicus – the stinkhorn toadstool. Autumn in all her fruitfulness, and yet again a new season spelt out to him how much of the year had gone, how much of it he had passed in the dream.
He rested the full bucket on the lip of the well. It was definitely autumn, the last pretence of summer dropped, too cold to be out before eight in the morning in his shirtsleeves. Half a mile in the distance he could see the slate gables of a big house, and he realised he was staring at the back of The Glebe, that the meadow that rolled down into the valley from Tara Ffitch’s yard was the same one he had looked into for the best part of twenty weeks from The Glebe. If he found the time, he’d look in on Catesby before he drove to London.
He followed the scent of stinkhorn. Only a fool would eat the stinking prick, but if it was close by, so might be the highly edible Boletus edulis or the more common Agaricus campestris, and a day without much in the way of breakfast might suddenly have the best of beginnings.
Half an hour later he woke Tara. She was buried in a rough mountain of sheets and blankets. One arm, one foot and a few strands of mousy hair showed where she was.
‘Good God, Troy. I don’t do mornings. Never have. What time is it?’
‘About half past eight.’
‘Troy, just fuck off will you!’
‘I need to talk to you. Besides I’ve made breakfast.’
‘Out of what? Fresh air and toadstools?’
‘More or less.’
She sat at the kitchen table wearing the eiderdown, held in place by a firm grip from her armpits. The look on her face said ‘so surprise me’. He did. She took one bite and gasped.
‘Good grief. It’s bloody marvellous! Whatever is it?’
‘Toast.’
‘I can see that.’
‘With creamed cèpes, a touch of parsley I found in what remains of your garden, and a dash of garlic I found growing wild. The rest I improvised from the contents of your larder.’
He did not tell her that he had picked the maggots from the flour. She wolfed the slice, the eiderdown slipped, a nipple escaped and she did not care to retrieve it.
‘Any more?’
‘Toast takes a while over a gas ring, but yes, there’s more.’
He stuck a slice of bread on the end of the toasting fork and lit the gas ring. He dangled the bread, a visible temptation.
‘You were saying last night that Blood gave the worst of his interrogation to Caro.’
‘Bastard. He’d have never have got the better of her with me there.’
‘I’ll need to talk to Caro.’
‘Nothing doing, Troy.’
He lit a flame under the mushroom sauce, hoping the aroma would waft her way.
‘I have to know everything. If I thought you’d seen it all, believe me, I wouldn’t ask to see her. Where is she, by the way?’
Tara said nothing.
Troy said nothing. Turned the toast, stirred the sauce.
‘If I were to tell you . . .’
Troy was not about to finish this or any other sentence for her.
‘It would be off the record, wouldn’t it?’
‘I’m investigating a murder. Nothing’s off the record. If, along the way, I have to investigate Percy Blood because he’s conducted his investigation with scant regard for the rules, then I will. But nothing’s off the record.’
‘We lied. Both of us in our statements. Me in court. That’s perjury, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. But I wouldn’t worry about it. If Blood did what you say he did, no one is going to charge you with perjury. No one is going to take Caro’s baby. Trust me, I’m a very important policeman. All I want to do is get Caro’s version. That means notes. If as a result of that Blood is reprimanded, or God knows perhaps charged, I’ll need it in writing.’
‘Wit hthe two of us as witnesses?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then the answer’s no. Caro’s been a witness once too often. We can’t put her through that again. Now, are you going to give me seconds or are we going play temptation all morning?’
‘I do have one last question.’
‘Fire away,’ she said.
‘Do you know of anyone who might want Fitz dead?’
‘No one and everyone,’ she replied. ‘No one who knew him, and almost everyone who didn’t.’
After breakfast Tara yawned, kissed him on the cheek and went back to bed. He was in the lane starting the Bentley when she stuck her head out of her bedroom window.
‘Troy,’ she yelled, ‘I meant what I said. You have to talk to Alex. I don’t want to hear a peep out of him for two weeks. Capiche?’