As they walked down towards the festival centre, Francis couldn’t help but notice the increased media presence. By the gates to the school, where the banners flapped in the strengthening breeze, there were two full TV crews as well as a gaggle of paparazzi, burly, shaven-headed men carrying cameras with enormous lenses, who looked as if they would stop at nothing to get the picture that paid. None of this seemed to have set the festival back, though. Au contraire. The site was packed and Family Man’s event was sold out.
‘Sorry,’ said the plump young woman at the ticket booth. ‘It’s returns only now.’ She pointed at a long queue of hopeful punters: mums and dads with kids, older couples in matching anoraks, even a sprinkling of funky-looking young singles, one with a wicker basket over her bare shoulder containing a fresh cabbage. God help us, thought Francis. The power of the TV image. Realised in devoted followers.
‘I’m going to have to call in a favour,’ he told Priya. He turned to another of the festival elves, a skinny creature with huge teeth that she seemed to be constantly trying to swallow. ‘Excuse me. Could you possibly get Laetitia Humble for me?’
‘She’s, like, reelly busy at the moment.’
‘I appreciate that. Could you tell her that Francis Meadowes is extremely keen to see the Family Man talk as he wants to write about it for a national newspaper. I spoke yesterday,’ he added, as the young woman stood looking at him and Priya open-mouthed. ‘In the Big Tent. Sold out.’
‘OK.’ She scurried off.
‘Sorry,’ said Francis. ‘I don’t usually pull rank, but …’
‘Don’t worry. I’d do the same if I could.’
A minute later Laetitia appeared, today in a magnificent William Morris style floral skirt, all greens and oranges and pale blues.
‘Francis, darling. You’re still here. How wonderful.’ She dropped her voice and pushed him and Priya away from the returns queue. ‘Of course we can get you in to see Jonty. And you must come to the Green Room afterwards. It would be good for you two to meet. He’ll doubtless have a few books to sign in the bookshop, but we’ll all be there straight after.’
‘I’d like that. Is there any chance you could squeeze in my good friend Priya Kaur as well?’
Laetitia’s eyes were on stalks. You could almost hear her whirring through her mental Rolodex trying to place this possibly significant Asian female.
‘Priya was Bryce Peabody’s partner.’
‘Of course! I knew I knew the name.’ Laetitia’s grin switched to an appropriate mask of tragedy. ‘I’m so sorry about Bryce. I was one of his greatest fans. Such a huge talent.’
‘Thank you,’ said Priya.
Laetitia shook her head. ‘This weekend has been ghastly. First Bryce, and then this poor girl out at Wyveridge. I don’t know what’s going on. And now we’ve got totally the wrong kind of press crawling all over the place.’ She glanced imperiously at the waiting elf. ‘Two for the VIP row, please, Victoria. D’you mind taking them in?’
So Francis and Priya were ushered into the packed tent and shown to seats five rows from the front. On the big screen above the stage was projected the jacket cover of Wild Stuff: nettles, sorrel, seaweed, samphire, with a fine array of mushrooms and berries Francis would have struggled to put a name to.
‘If we do get to talk to Jonty afterwards, will you do me a favour?’ he said.
‘What’s that?’
‘I’m going to bring up the subject of Bryce’s talk and ask you, in front of him, if you had any idea what was in it. Will you please deny all knowledge?’
‘Why?’
‘Partly because I want to gauge his reaction; and partly to protect … you,’ he said, dropping his voice because the tent had now hushed. Up on stage, Laetitia had come out from behind the entrance screen, bringing with her the genial, grinning, always slightly shambling presence that was Family Man. Jonty was casually but fashionably dressed, in a green and white checked shirt, faded blue jeans and brand new Converse trainers. His long, trademark blond hair covered what his public knew all too well were his rather large ears. To either side of that famous beak his eyes sat perhaps a fraction too close together. Francis had of course been aware of him; how could he not be, straddled as he was across all media in a way that only the biggest celebs are. Home Cooking, the show that had made his name, was still a weekly fixture on BBC One. More recently, there had been spinoffs. Family Man’s Big Adventure, for example, in which our hero had left the comfort zone of Peewit Farm and gone off round the world examining ‘family values’ while doing a bit of cheffing on the side. Francis had caught half of a programme in which Jonty had been learning how to make a yak curry in Nepal. ‘We have so much to learn from simple Asian families like this,’ he’d said, as he sat in the dirt with some toothless matriarch, now his new best friend.
‘Good afternoon,’ said Laetitia, casting admiring looks in her guest’s direction. ‘Jonty Smallbone is one of those wonderful people who’s so famous he barely needs an introduction. Certainly not to you lot. But what we love about him, in addition to his cooking and his farming and his writing and everything else he does so well, is how reassuringly down to earth and unpretentious he remains. He really is, always has been, so refreshingly himself. So now, without further ado …’
You had to hand it to him, Francis thought, watching Jonty swing into action. His thank you to Laetitia was charming and sincere, yet somehow managed to convey that her gushing welcome was a bit on the ridiculous side. Then he moved on to his audience, thanking them for coming, making them feel special, to the point where you almost started to feel it was just you and him in here; and his family, of course, whom he introduced from the front row: wife Amber, sons Ethan and Milo, and baby daughter Jasmine, a bouncy-looking creature in a shiny pink frock, with red-spotted bows in her pigtails. No sign of little Amelie, though.
‘I suppose,’ Jonty said, ‘you’d like to hear about the new book. Since this is a literary festival.’ It was called Wild Stuff, he went on, when the laughter had died down, because that’s what it was about. ‘And the great thing about wild stuff, particularly in these straitened times, is that most of it is also free stuff. Nettle soup, for example, costs nothing and is absolutely delicious. If you try and buy samphire in Primrose Hill it’ll cost you five pounds a bunch. Go up to the marshes of North Norfolk and, as my sons here will tell you, at this time of year it’s literally sprawling across the mud.’
The book was about all the natural nourishment you could find, he continued, in the hedgerows, the woods, the fields, the rivers, the sea. There was even a chapter on road kill. ‘If you get to it quick enough, there’s really no reason to throw it away. I remember once, driving home to Peewit, knocking down a pheasant on a back lane. We scooped it up, plucked it, cleaned it, and had it roast for lunch the next day …’
When the session was over Francis and Priya walked through to the bookshop. Francis didn’t join the long queue waiting for the precious signature; instead, like Priya, he picked up a copy of the lavishly illustrated hardback from the big stack on the central table and glanced through it, starting with the blurb on the inside front flap:
When Jonty Smallbone left the Navy to start his own smallholding in the 1990s, little did he realise he was on the way to becoming a national treasure …
After a cursory look at the chapter on road kill (Badger Casserole with Wild Garlic and Field Blewit mushrooms looked surprisingly tasty), Francis looked over and caught Priya’s eye. Her dark eyebrows flicked upwards as her forefinger tapped the title of a chapter called ‘Wild Highs’. This was certainly intriguing, going in some depth into the properties of wild (lettuce) opium, magic mushrooms (fly agaric and liberty cap), salvia, betel nut, jimson weed, qat, peyote and yerba, amongst others.
PSILOCYBE SEMILANCEATA, or liberty cap as it’s more often known, is the classic ‘magic mushroom’ or ‘shroom’. It’s a tiny, bell-shaped fungus, typically with a pointed umbo (see photograph), like the French ‘liberty cap’. It grows abundantly in grassland: on lawns, in parks, on playing fields and in wilder pastures too. The fungus fruits in late summer and autumn, and is common after heavy rain. Once offering a legal high, the liberty cap is, since the Misuse of Drugs Act 2005, a Class A drug, which means that any preparation involving it is illegal.
Dried shrooms are more powerful than fresh ones and are often made into tea. Some people experience nausea when taking shrooms; sensory changes kick in after about forty minutes and can last for several hours. These range from a general feeling of wellbeing to hallucinations, very similar to those experienced by takers of LSD …
Having glanced through the rest of this section, Francis went on to a chapter entitled ‘The Dangerous Wild: Poisonous Plants in Our Hedgerows and Gardens’. This had similar informative paragraphs alongside colourful photos:
People generally know about things like deadly nightshade, ivy and yew, but less often about azaleas, delphiniums, foxgloves and lilies. The list goes on, not all of them easy to recognise. The toxic red berries of black bryony and bittersweet are awfully similar to rosehip or rowan, which you might make wine or jelly from …
At the back of the book, Francis found the Acknowledgments, which was mostly a list of Jonty’s famous and influential friends. Right at the end, however, was a telltale sentence: With special thanks to Anna Copeland, without whom – or is that without who, Anna? – words don’t come easy.
As he turned to Priya, he was smiling.
‘Interesting?’ she asked.
‘Certainly is. Shall we see what’s going in the Green Room?’
Forty-five minutes later Jonty finally came through, his family and Laetitia in tow. They took a seat on a sofa complex in the corner while Laetitia bustled around, organising refreshments. Francis kept glancing in her direction; but after five minutes, it didn’t look as if her promised introduction was going to materialise.
‘Time to be proactive,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘Let’s put her on the spot.’ He winked at Priya and headed across the room, wine glass in hand.
‘Laetitia,’ he said, and watched with amusement as her face re-registered him, realised the position she was in, then, like a recalibrating satnav, switched into welcoming mode.
‘Francis Meadowes, how lovely, you’re still here.’ She turned to Jonty. ‘The well-known crime writer,’ she added. ‘Francis, I’m sure you know Jonty, by reputation if nothing else, but maybe not his lovely wife Amber, and their three amazing kids, Ethan, Milo and, er, Jasmine. And this is Priya, oh gosh, sorry …’
‘Kaur.’
‘Of course, apologies, festival brain overload, shoot me please. Priya was Bryce Peabody’s partner.’
‘We’ve met,’ said Jonty. ‘On Saturday night.’
‘At my party?’ said Laetitia.
‘It was actually out at Wyveridge afterwards.’
‘Oh.’
‘And then again yesterday morning,’ said Priya.
Jonty flicked a rapid sideways glance at his wife. ‘Yes, indeed,’ he said.
‘You were very consoling, thank you,’ said Priya.
‘The least I could do. Such an awful shock for all of us.’ Whatever else he was, Francis thought, Jonty was an impeccable performer. Next to him, Amber’s features were hard to read: her lips tight together in a slight downwards curve, her eyes expressionless. Seeing her in the flesh explained why you saw so little of her on the TV, even as her children were shaping up to be little stars. ‘Bryce’s reviews were like my wicked indulgence,’ Jonty was saying now. ‘Always so funny. Even if they could be a tad cruel at times.’ He shook his head again. ‘But such a terrible thing to happen. To one so … relatively young. He wasn’t particularly old, was he?’
‘Fifty-four,’ said Priya; and Jonty’s look was priceless, as he focused all too obviously on Priya, in the beige dress that hugged her figure as tightly as a T-shirt.
‘Only five years older than you, darling,’ said Amber. Her voice was a posh, no-nonsense drawl.
Jonty ignored this wifely dart. ‘So do we know what happened yet?’ he asked.
‘The police are still waiting for the post-mortem,’ said Francis.
Jonty looked from Francis to Priya and back again. ‘And do they seriously suspect … murder?’ he asked, his voice dropping to a whisper. ‘Or is that just gossip?’
‘It seems as if they might,’ said Francis.
‘When for all we know the poor man may have had a heart attack.’
‘Or an aneurysm,’ said Francis. ‘Which the doctor seemed to think as likely.’
Jonty nodded thoughtfully. ‘Did he? Trouble is, the local constabulary probably don’t get much going on down this way. If something like this happens, they get overexcited, start to think they’re in an episode of Midsomer Murders.’
‘But this second tragedy has rather changed the picture, don’t you think?’ said Francis.
‘Now that does sound like a ghastly accident,’ said Jonty. ‘The story I heard was that they were all high on drugs out there.’
‘But you were out at Wyveridge yourself, you said?’
Jonty didn’t blink. ‘Yes. Amber came with me. Seemed like a pretty lively scene, didn’t it, darling? We didn’t stay long.’
‘Did you see evidence of drugs?’
‘Can’t say I did. But you’d hardly expect to. People tend to pop into toilets and upstairs rooms to do these things, don’t they?’
‘I believe they do,’ said Francis. ‘So you don’t think the two deaths are linked?’
Jonty seemed almost thrown, but only for a couple of seconds. ‘Do you?’ he returned.
‘Two unexplained deaths in twenty-four hours,’ Francis replied. ‘It does seem a bit … surprising, to say the least. How many other incidents like this have you had over the years, Laetitia?’
‘We’ve had heart attacks and so on, but always of much older people – and never of one of our performers. Nothing like this. I mean, front page news and all that.’
‘I guess if you’re a crime writer,’ Jonty cut in, ‘you’re bound to be trying to find a story here. But d’you know what? I hate to be controversial, but here’s poor Bryce, whose death – with respect, Priya – the entire festival has been gossiping about, but could very well be from natural causes. By the same token, I’d say it was perfectly possible that this unfortunate girl was high on some drug or other and thought she could fly off this tower or whatever.’
‘Magic mushrooms, perhaps,’ said Francis. ‘Though maybe it’s too early in the season to find them out in the wild?’
Family Man shrugged. ‘Hard to say …’
‘I noticed you had a very interesting chapter on “natural highs” in your book.’
Jonty laughed, perhaps a little too loudly. ‘You’ve actually read it! I’m flattered.’ If looks could kill, Francis thought, I would be the third victim of this festival. ‘No,’ Family Man went on, ‘since you ask, it’s a fascinating area, rather vexed of course since the change in the law of July 2005, which means that technically you could get seven years for picking a bag of liberty caps and taking them home. Meanwhile, equally scary things remain legal: fly agaric, for example, the other kind of magic mushroom, the crimson one with white spots, the toadstool of the children’s stories, which can make you seriously ill. Or Salvia divinorum, which is a kind of sage, and could give you a trip to put mushrooms – or even LSD – in the shade …’
‘You’ve tried it?’
‘Salvia, lord no! You wouldn’t catch me with any of these things. But you’ve only to look on YouTube. There’s hundreds of videos of young people freaking out on this stuff. Terrifying to watch, some of them.’
‘I enjoyed your chapter on natural poisons too.’
‘Did you?’ Jonty looked slowly round the little group and his face cracked into an uneasy smile. ‘Looks like I’ve got a fan here. No, that’s a whole other subject which, and don’t let my publisher hear this, I could have done much more on.’
‘Do I feel another book coming on?’ said Laetitia.
‘Now there’s an idea!’ said Jonty. ‘But seriously, you couldn’t do a book like Wild Stuff without pointing out that not everything in our fields and hedgerows is harmless.’ He turned to his children. ‘I remember when you guys were little, having to keep a jolly careful eye on you when we were out on country walks. You in particular, Milo, used to love shoving anything and everything into your greedy little gob. Holly berries, yew berries, the works. It was a constant worry.’
‘Yes, Dad,’ said Milo, eyes glazing over.
‘I think I’d like to have you with me in person,’ said Laetitia, ‘before picking the ingredients for any wild meal I tried to have.’
There was polite laughter in the circle.
‘You can always read the book,’ said Jonty. ‘The photographs are pretty accurate. And you’re hardly going to get into trouble with nettle soup or nasturtium salad.’
‘The very best of luck with it,’ said Francis. ‘I’m sure you’ll do well.’
Laetitia pointed two fingers at Jonty’s head. ‘Number five as we speak.’
‘Congratulations,’ said Francis. ‘And climbing, I hope? D’you get time to write the books yourself?’
‘Of course. Like to be hands-on. Obviously I have researchers to help with some of the boring detail, but no, at the end of the day, it’s my golden prose.’
‘So refreshing to hear that,’ Francis said. ‘Priya and I were just saying, earlier, so much of what’s out there now isn’t written by the people whose name’s on the cover. Particularly when it comes to busy celebrities. She was telling me that that’s what Bryce’s talk was going to be about. The one he sadly never got round to delivering.’
Francis’s accomplice laughed nervously; she was acting her part well. ‘That’s what he hinted,’ she said. ‘But he never let me read his speeches before he delivered them.’
‘Is that so?’ said Family Man.
‘You knew the title, though,’ Francis prompted.
‘Celebrity and Hypocrisy. Hardly a secret, it’s in the programme.’
‘Shittety-shit!’ said Jonty. ‘That sounds interesting.’ He fixed them all with a tigerish grin. ‘Did he really not tell you what it was about? I run everything past Amber. She’s like my in-house editor. She’ll always tell me if I’ve made a joke that’s a bit off-colour or whatever. And she certainly knows how to trim me if I’m being boring.’
‘Shall I trim you now then?’ said his wife, and despite, or perhaps because of her deadpan tone, there was laughter from the group. For a second, a tiny acknowledging smile flickered on her thin lips. Francis reckoned the time had come to move on.
‘I hope I gave you the answer you wanted,’ Priya said to Francis as they crossed the room.
‘Perfect. The subject of Bryce’s talk was raised and there was a reaction.’
‘He gave the impression he knew nothing about it?’
‘Exactly. And simultaneously we got across that you didn’t either. Which hopefully will make you a little safer.’
‘You really think that Jonty …?’
‘I’m keeping an open mind, Priya. So you spoke to him again yesterday morning? You didn’t tell me that.’
‘I ran into him on the terrace of the White Hart. When Grace was there filming, after breakfast. He came straight over and gave me a hug. Which was nice of him, considering we’d only chatted for a few minutes the night before.’
‘Very nice of him,’ said Francis. ‘I’m sure his motives were entirely pure. How long a hug was it?’
‘Long enough.’ Priya made a ‘yuk’ face and Francis laughed. ‘So why were you asking all that stuff about mushrooms?’ she asked.
‘Why indeed?’ said Francis, looking at his watch. ‘Now what time is it? I’d quite like to shoot out to Wyveridge. See if we can’t find Rory and his posse. And see what the police are up to. You coming?’