‘We’ll drop these off on the way, if you don’t mind,’ Laura said, and ushered her into the hallway. They were almost at the front door when Harry came rushing up behind them.
‘Mum, where are you going?’ he asked, plangently.
‘We’re going to the food bank,’ she said. ‘And then we’re going for a walk.’
‘Can I come with you?’ he pleaded.
‘No. You stay here. I thought you were playing with Keisha.’
‘I was but now she’s busy. She says she has lots of things to do.’
‘Well … read a book, or watch a video or something.’ Her tone was noticeably abrupt, dismissive. Rachel looked at her in surprise.
‘Oh Mum, please. I want to come with you.’
With obvious reluctance, Laura finally relented. Out on the drive she heaved Harry into the back of the car and strapped him into his booster seat and then the three of them drove off in the direction of Didcot.
*
Rachel had never been to a food bank before. She had read articles about them, online and in the newspapers. But she had never been inside one.
It was a brief visit, so she only received a fleeting impression. The bank had been set up in what appeared still to be used, on other days of the week, as a café, located in a narrow side road running off the high street. People were sitting in family groups at each of the lightweight silver tables, but they were not drinking coffee: they were clutching vouchers and waiting for their parcels to be made up. Nobody bore any outward sign of poverty. Well-dressed couples waited in pensive silence while bored children sat beside them. The most noticeable thing was that nobody from one table ever seemed to make eye contact with anyone from another. The prevailing mood, as far as Rachel could see, was one of mortification: everybody simply wanted to finish their business and leave as quickly as possible. Somewhere at the back there seemed to be a store room, where the parcels were made up: these would then be carried to the counter where volunteers would match them up to the relevant voucher and call out a number. A family member would scurry up to the counter, eyes never leaving the floor, grab the parcel and then usher their partner or children out of the front door. A number would be called out every twenty or thirty seconds, and there was a constant stream of people going in and out. It was as busy as a GP’s waiting room.
People glanced up at Laura, Rachel and Harry as they came in carrying their shopping bags, but soon looked away again. It was painfully clear who was a donor and who was a supplicant. Rachel had rarely felt so self-conscious. They were shown straight to the store room, and dropped off their bags so quickly that Rachel barely had time to take in the variety of food on the shelves: row upon row of tinned fruit, tinned meat, bags of rice and pasta, packets of biscuits and cakes, all marked with use-by dates in thick black marker pen. Harry, his eye-level lower than hers, stared longingly at a stack of chocolate bars in different-coloured wrappers.
‘Why can’t we ever take any stuff from the food bank?’ he asked his mother as she tugged him away. ‘Why do we only ever give things?’
‘Oh, do shut up,’ she said, and Rachel was struck again by the note of severity and impatience in her voice.
After that, the drive to Longworth took about twenty-five minutes. By the time they turned off the A420 on the outskirts of the village, it was quite late, and the cloud-covered sky was already darkening to a deeper grey. The village itself seemed sleepy, relaxed, perfectly indifferent to (or oblivious of) the tragedy that had unfolded there almost a decade earlier. Laura seemed to know exactly which turnings to take, and where to park the car.
‘You’ve been here a few times before, then, have you?’ Rachel asked.
‘Yes, Roger and I used to come here quite often. You don’t have to be a David Kelly obsessive to like Harrowdown Hill. It’s a nice walk, apart from anything else. Which is why he took it that afternoon, of course.’
They pulled in to the car park of The Blue Boar pub, a cosy, welcoming thatched building in Cotswold stone, which nonetheless appeared to be closed this afternoon, going by the dimness of the lighting just about visible through its tiny windows. Wrapping up against the now very tangible chill, the two women turned right out of the car park and set off down the lane at a brisk pace, with little Harry dawdling behind them, tracing a more erratic route which involved zig-zagging from one side of the lane to the other. It was a no-through road, and there was no traffic: any approaching cars would have been easy to hear, so Laura did not seem at all concerned that he was playing unsupervised. She was more worried that he was holding them back.
‘Hurry up, Harry!’ she called, turning and frowning at him. ‘You’ve got to keep up with us. You’re making us all go too slowly.’
Harry ran towards her obediently and clasped her hand. Mother and son walked along like that for half a minute or so; then Rachel noticed that Laura unloosed his hand and let it fall.
‘So,’ Laura now said, ‘this is the lane he would have walked along, at about three o’clock in the afternoon. And that’s the hill he was making for — look, just ahead on the left.’
Rachel’s eyes followed her pointing finger, towards a nondescript, tree-covered mound in the landscape which made the word ‘hill’ seem somewhat hyperbolic. In the rapidly fading daylight, it did not look especially beautiful.
‘We won’t be able to get into the wood,’ Laura added. ‘They’ve put barbed wire around it now.’
Before long the tarmac had petered out and they found themselves walking up a dirt track, overgrown with grass and bordered with weeds and wild flowers. Harry took a stick to these and was soon hacking them down with gusto.
‘I can see why they’d do that,’ said Rachel. ‘You’re right, it does feel a bit … morbid, coming here.’
‘Why do you remember the news story so clearly, do you think?’ Laura asked. ‘You must have been very young when it happened.’
‘I was ten. I was staying with my grandparents, and I remember them being very shocked by it. My grandad always hated Tony Blair so of course he was prepared to think the worst. I mean, I’m not sure he thought he was murdered or anything, but he definitely thought there was something strange about it …’
‘I know, it felt very … odd, didn’t it, that day?’ Laura said. ‘But I’m not sure I believe in conspiracy theories, and what Roger said afterwards … He just thought that a line had been crossed, a terrible line, and it was the shockwaves of that which were giving everyone the sense that there was something else going on, something mysterious.’
They passed a sign which read ‘River Thames, ¾ Mile’, which surprised Racheclass="underline" she had not realized that the river was nearby. Harry was starting to look cold. Another few minutes and they would be as close to the top of the hill as the path allowed, with the fatal woodland spreading out to their left.
‘He had this theory,’ said Laura, ‘— Roger was full of theories, mainly I suppose because that’s what he got paid for … Anyway, this one was that every generation has a moment when they lose their innocence. Their political innocence. And that’s what David Kelly’s death represented for our generation. Up until then, we’d been sceptical about the Iraq war. We’d suspected the government wasn’t telling us the whole truth. But the day he died was the day it became absolutely clear: the whole thing stank. Suicide or murder, it didn’t really matter. A good man had died, and it was the lies surrounding the war that had killed him, one way or another. So that was it. None of us could pretend any longer that we were being governed by honourable people.’