Some ten miles short of Ely, the van turned off along a rough track and bumped to a halt behind a mud-spattered tractor and several other vans. On trestle tables beneath a makeshift canopy, men and women were already working, sorting and wrapping cauliflowers in cellophane. Towards the far side of the field, indistinct in the havering mist, others moved slowly in the wake of an ancient harvester, straightening and bending, straightening and bending, loading cabbages into the low trailer that rattled behind.
A man in a dark fleece, gloves on his fists, stepped towards the van. ‘What sort of fuckin’ time d’you call this?’
The driver shrugged and grinned.
‘Laugh the other side of your fuckin’ face, one o’ these fine days.’
The driver laughed nervously and, taking the makings from his pocket, started to roll a cigarette. Most of the men had climbed down from the van and were standing in a rough circle, facing inwards, hands jammed down into their pockets as they stamped their feet. The others, two or three, sat close against the open door, staring out.
‘You,’ the foreman said, waving his fist. ‘You. Yes, you. What d’you think this is? Fuckin’ holiday? Get the fuck out of there and get to fuckin’ work.’
Across the slow spread of fields to the west, the blunt outline of Ely Cathedral pushed up from the plane of earth and bulked against the sky.
A hundred or so miles away, in North London, the purlieu of Highbury Fields, Jack Kiley woke in a bed that was not his own. From the radio at the other side of the room came the sounds of the Today programme, John Humphrys at full bite, castigating some hapless politician for something he or she had done or failed to do. Kiley pushed back the quilt and rolled towards the edge of the bed, feet quick to the floor. In the bathroom he relieved himself and washed his hands, splashed cold water in his face. At least now Kate was allowing him to leave a toothbrush there, a razor too, and he used both before descending.
Kate sat at the breakfast table, head over her laptop, fingers precise and quick across the keys. Kiley knew better than to interrupt. There was coffee in the cafetiere and he poured some into Kate’s almost empty mug before helping himself. His selflessness was acknowledged by a grunt and a dismissive wave of the hand.
A mound of the day’s papers, including the Independent, for whom Kate wrote a weekly column, was on a chair near the door, and Kiley carried them across to the padded seat in the window bay. Through the glass he could see the usual dog walkers in the park, joggers skirting the edge, more than one of them pushing those three-wheeler buggies that cost the price of a small second-hand car.
Automatically, he looked at the sports pages first to check the results and saw, with no satisfaction, that one of the teams he used to played for had now gone five matches without scoring a goal. Below the fold on the front page, the second lead was about the wife of a Home Office minister being attacked and robbed not so very far from where he was now.
‘In the early hours of yesterday morning, Helen Forester, wife of …’
What in God’s name was she doing, Kiley thought, wandering around the nether end of Stoke Newington at two in the morning? He checked the other papers. Only the disintegrating marriage of a B-celebrity soap star prevented the story from making a full sweep of the tabloids, ‘Minister’s Wife Mugged’ and similar dominating the rest in one-inch type. A library photograph of Helen Forester accompanying her husband to the last party conference was the most popular, her narrow, rather angular face strained beneath a round, flat-brimmed hat of the kind worn by Spanish bullfighters, her husband mostly cropped out.
‘Mrs Forester was found in a dazed state by passers-by and taken to Homerton hospital, where she was treated for minor injuries and shock.’
‘I know her,’ Kate said, looking up from her work. ‘Interviewed her for a piece on politicians’ wives. After all that fuss about Betsy what’s-her-name. I liked her. Intelligent. Mind of her own.’
‘Must have been switched off when this happened.’
‘Maybe.’
‘You think there’s more to it than meets the eye?’
‘Isn’t there always?’
‘You’re the journalist, you tell me.’
Kate shot him a sour glance and went back to the piece she was writing — ‘No More Faking It: the rehabilitation of Meg Ryan in In the Cut.’
‘At least it makes a change,’ Kiley said, ‘from MPs caught out cottaging on Clapham Common.’
But Kate had already switched him off.
By midday the Minister concerned had issued a brief statement. ‘My wife and I are grateful for all of the flowers and messages of support…’
The Shadow Home Secretary materialised long enough to fire the usual tired salvos about the unsafe streets of our cities and the need for more police officers on the beat. Nothing yet about what the unfortunate Mrs Forester had been doing out alone when she might more properly have been tucked up alongside her husband in the safety of their Islington flat or at their constituency home. That, Kiley was sure, would come.
Cafe tables were spread along the broad pavement north of Belsize Park underground station, and Kiley was sitting in the early autumn sunshine nursing a cappuccino and wondering what to do with the rest of the day.
Almost directly opposite, above the bookshop, his small two-room office held little attraction: the message light on the answerphone was, as far as he knew, not flickering, no urgent faxes lay waiting, any bills he was concerned with paying had been dealt with and his appointment book, had he possessed one, would have been blank. He could walk up the hill on to Hampstead Heath and enjoy the splendours of the turning leaves or stroll across to the Screen on the Hill and sit through the matinee of something exotic and life-affirming.
Then again, he could order another cappuccino, while he considered the possibility of lunch. Irena, the young Romanian waitress who moonlighted two mornings a week as his bookkeeper and secretary, was not on duty, and he caught the eye of a waiter, who by his accent was Spanish and most probably from Latin America. At one of the nearby tables, a May-November couple were holding hands and staring into one another’s eyes; at another, a man in a ‘Fight Global Capitalism’ T-shirt was listening contentedly to his iPod, and just within his line of vision, a young woman of twenty-two or — three, wearing dark glasses and a seriously abbreviated cerise top, was poring over The Complete Guide to Yoga. In small convoys, au pairs propelled their charges along the pavement opposite. The sun continued to shine. What was a seemingly intelligent, middle-aged middle-class woman doing, apparently alone, at the wrong end of Stoke Newington High Street at that hour of the morning? Like a hangnail, it nagged at him and wouldn’t let him rest.
Dusk prevailed. Lights showed pale under the canopy as the last supermarket loads were packed and readied. The workers, most of them, stood huddled around the vans, the faint glow of their cigarettes pink and red. Mud on their boots and the backs of their legs, along their arms and caked beneath their fingernails. The low line of trees at the far field edge was dark and, beyond it, the cathedral was black against the delicate pink of the sky.