Small Town Suspicions (Some Very English Murders Book 3) by Issy Brooke Page B

been. Still, they had the windows
rolled down and their elbows out, and she wore large sunglasses to feel a bit
like Jackie O.
    “There’s nothing here,” she
said. “Nothing. Just sky.”
    “Sky isn’t nothing,” Drew
said. “There’s clouds. Birds. Colours.”
    “Yes but other than that, there’s
nothing, and it goes on forever. It’s actually like being at sea.”
    “It was sea, once, and I
think one day it will be sea again, and cabbages will cost more.”
    Penny laughed. “Excuse me?”
    “This is all artificial,”
Drew explained. “As far as I understand it, it was marshland for centuries.
Aeons, however long one of them is. I think the Romans did some drainage and
cut some ditches, but when they left, it was pretty much a lawless place. Until,
of course, Charles the First needed to raise some cash because Parliament was
getting all bolshie with him.”
    “He did ask for it,” Penny
said. “The bolshiness, I mean.”
    “He was misunderstood.
Anyway, so he started to sell off parcels of this marshland to rich folks,
telling them they could drain it and use it as agricultural land and they’d be
rich. The Dutch had done it, and they had developed some techniques for
draining the soil.”
    “Yeah, but where does the
water go?” she asked.
    “It’s still there. That’s
why there are so many pumping stations and sluices out here. It’s continual.
Much of this land is actually below sea level.”
    “That must be at a high risk
of flooding, then. Why bother? This area isn’t that big.”
    Drew laughed. “Look at it.”
    “What am I looking at?”
    “Crops. Fields. Incredibly
fertile land. I mean, a seriously large proportion of much of our market garden
produce comes from here. That’s what I mean by the price of cabbages going up
if it all floods again. This peaty soil is perfect. And not just for cabbages,
either.” Drew slowed the car down. There were no vehicles to be seen, either
behind them or in front of them. The road was arrow-straight, with a ditch
either side. “Look in there.”
    “What is it?”
    “I’m guessing it was tulips.
I should bring you back in springtime when it’s just ablaze with colour from
horizon to horizon. Honestly, now people come from Holland to see our bulb fields.”
    “And that’s what Carl
Fredericks does,” Penny said. “Grows flowers.”
    “Bulbs, I think,” Drew said.
    They drove on. The road
occasionally made inexplicable right-angled turns, and they passed sporadic
outcrops of houses and buildings that looked tiny, dwarfed by the empty sky.
    Eventually they came to a
junction. To the right, the road ran on in a straight line, heading for Boston.
There was a sign pointing to the left, advertising Fredericks’ Bulb Growers.
The road was tarmac, but single-track with grass, very neatly clipped, close to
both sides.
    Drew pulled into the turning
but then stopped and killed the engine. “Come on,” he said. “Get out for a
moment.”
    Penny unfolded herself and
stretched her legs as she stood up straight. She wrinkled her nose. “What’s
that smell? I mean, it’s not unpleasant.”
    “Just pollen and agriculture
and stuff,” he said. “The one smell you don’t want to encounter out here is
when they’re dredging the dykes.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
Penny said. “I have got to assume that has a totally different meaning to what
it would sound like in London…”
    Drew raised his eyebrows
innocently. “The dykes? The narrow drainage channels that run along the edge of
the fields. In some places, dyke means a raised bank, but not here. The Romans
dug the Carr Dyke, as it happens, and it still exists. But they get clogged
with weeds and so on, so periodically they need to drag all the vegetable
matter from the bottom, and they just dump it on the banks. And it stinks.”
    “Delightful.” Penny gazed
around, staring out to the shimmering horizon. The atmosphere was hazy with
heat and the colours were washed out and faded. “What am