David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

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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 … ”