Chapter 14
The train to Oxford was peaceful, soothing even, after the obstacle race she’d endured to catch it.
On board, Jo made calls as best she could.
Anxious to make sure that Nettie was OK, she put in a call to Simon and was surprised to receive something of an apology from him.
Annette was fine, he reassured her and he wouldn’t do anything like this again, not without full consultation.
Once she’d offloaded a bit of her ‘I should think so too’ indignation, she decided to call a truce, so she could pump him for any useful pathology contacts.
Then she’d phoned or left messages with all the medical people she could think of, worrying away at where the vaccination story should go next.
She was also trying to find out if anyone could tell her more about the London and Middlesex Hospital pathology lab.
But as Jeff had warned: anonymous email was dodgy. If Wolff-Meyer was spying on her, couldn’t they also be sending red herrings her way?
The three messages she’d had so far from this one source were printed out in a file in her bag.
She took the pages out and spread them across the table.
There was the cutting about the first whooping cough victim, Katie Theroux.
Then there was the story about Dr Taylor almost struck off for giving single injections, then the snippet about the pathology lab donation.
Katie and Dr Taylor were both genuine. And the lab donation story checked out too.
Someone was trying to guide her in a certain direction.
She folded the pages back into her file and turned to the other bundle of papers in her bag – printouts of all the available Savannah Tyler news stories.
There wasn’t much, considering how well known she was becoming.
Some news coverage of early protests: ‘Oxford Greens block roads to demand cuts in traffic,’ ‘Hands off our parks,’ that kind of thing.
Whatever Savannah was involved in, there was always a big photo of her – hardly surprising because she looked so striking.
Jo took several minutes to do the ‘woman to woman’ appraisal: Savannah was unusually tall, she had a slim figure and long, pale brown hair, rather radically streaked with white at the front, which she tended to wear tied back in a ponytail or up in a messy bun.
She had a taste for floaty dresses, sturdy boots and exotic knitting.
In all the photos, she was wearing long, elegant cardigans over dresses, or patterned woollen coats, everything buckled and belted, with scarves and chunky necklaces.
Her face was one of those pale, sculpted wonders, which always looks fabulous in photos: high cheekbones, grey-ish eyes and a wide mouth.
Apart from the white streak, she looked about five years younger than her newspaper-stated age of thirty-seven.
The later cuttings were all reports on speeches, events or appearances she’d made on TV. As Jo knew, she’d never given a personal interview.
Most of the articles were straight:
Greens call for huge investment in public transport.
A Greener way ahead for schools.
But there were mocking pieces as well:
The Barmy Tree Army
and the inevitable:
Will this Green Goddess lure the voters?
Jo had already discussed the ‘Green Goddess’ nickname with Jeff.
‘Do we have to call her that?’ she’d asked.
‘Er, yes, I think you’ll find that we do,’ Jeff had replied.
‘It’s so tacky and so obvious.’
Jeff had just tilted his head to the side and said: ‘Yeah, well, so are we.’
‘No, we’re not,’ she’d insisted. ‘We’re a family newspaper.’
‘Hmm, we still like to be tacky and obvious, though.’
‘Please, couldn’t we just try something a bit different? Green Queen? Green Dream?’
‘Let’s see what your angle on her is. That might give us a better headline.
Jo, I will look into it,’ he promised. She must have looked unconvinced though, because he’d added, ‘I will personally supervise the sub in charge of the headline if it makes you happy. How about that?’ Then he’d shooed her out of the door to go and catch her train.
Once she was off the train, the bus took her efficiently through the centre of Oxford.
The sun was out after a shower of rain so buildings and pavements were gleaming.
Jo spotted ancient stone archways smothered in green and purple climbers, tiny leaded windowpanes, shop fronts which didn’t look as if they’d changed since Victorian times, signs for cream teas on every corner, but soon the bus was moving to the other side of town where the buildings grew smaller in scale, then became two-storey houses lining the roads.
‘This is it,’ the driver told her, pulling up at what had to be the last bus stop in town where the houses ended and a wide, old-fashioned English common opened out.
Jo had already checked her directions and knew she had to take the first left turn, walk for five minutes, then third on the left and she would be there – at number 59.
Walking down a small road of single-storey cottages with bright doors, flowers and decorative pots in the front gardens, number 59 wasn’t hard to spot.
The cottage at the end of the lane was the most cheerful and the most bizarre.
It was so close to the stile beside the grassy common that maybe it was once the gatekeeper’s house.
Obviously, Oxford planners were open to new ideas, as she doubted that a home like this would be allowed in her patch of London where the regimented rows of terraced houses looked so exactly the same.
Her first impression was of rampant, overgrown greenery.
The front garden was full of plants, bushes and two fruit trees.
There were pea plants clambering up over the wooden fence, and the garden sloped down from the house in raised beds, densely planted, not just with flowers, but also with potatoes, runner beans, raspberry canes, and plants Jo couldn’t identify.
Two window boxes were filled with herbs.
But the most extraordinary thing about the little house was its roof. The other cottages in the street had dark slate tiles, but the whole roof area of number 59 was planted in grass that had grown long and tufted, apart from the area of sleek solar panels.
Jo had barely set her hand on the wooden gate when the front door opened and there was Savannah calling out a cheerful ‘hello’.
From where Jo was standing, Savannah, at the top of her sloped garden and the two steps to her front door, looked enormous, completely out of scale with this dainty cottage. How could someone so tall live in such a small house?
‘Jo Randall?’ Savannah asked in a clear, unaccented voice. ‘Come in. Have you had a good journey? Were my directions all right?’
Answering ‘yes’, smiling, doing the shaking hands thing in the cramped lobby at the top of the steps, Jo assessed this woman. She was even taller and more handsome in real life, with her striking face and dramatic flash of white hair, today partially tied back with a jewelled clasp.
She had dry brown hands and an assortment of silver rings that clanked against Jo’s own when they shook hands.
‘It’s so good to meet you at last,’ Jo said, and meant it.
Savannah’s dress of choice today was pale green and flowered, with a deep V-neck.
Over it she wore a long pale green cardigan.
The effect was casually glamorous. There was a flat seashell round her neck on a slim leather string and her face, bare of make-up but gleaming with moisturiser, was strong with a shapely nose, those soaring cheekbones and a friendly smile.
She held onto Jo’s hand, warmly and told her, ‘I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time. I like what you do. I like the way you make complicated issues easy to understand and you always question everything.’
‘Thank you.’ Jo smiled at the compliment then followed Savannah into a bright sitting room, all white with big pot plants, a leather sofa, crammed bookcase and interesting things on the wall.
Dominating one entire side of the room was a huge, framed photograph of Earth taken from space.
‘That’s fantastic,’ Jo commented, pointing to it.
‘Get up close,’ Savannah urged her. ‘Everyone loves to look at it. It’s amazing what you can see, so many colours and the brilliant blue.
It’s incredible. There’s something about seeing Earth from space, which makes it overwhelming, impossible to understand.
Planet Earth. My mission’s to protect it, of course.
’ She delivered this line with a throaty giggle.
Jo went over as instructed to take a closer look.
‘It’s wonderful. Where did you get it?’ she asked, deciding that she had to have one. The girls would love it.
‘A friend of mine’s an astronaut.’ Savannah laughed, as if slightly embarrassed by this revelation.
‘Really? Who?’ Jo asked.
‘Er – I don’t think I can tell you.’
‘So soon into the interview and already you’re not answering my questions,’ was Jo’s smiled response.
‘Ha ha, very good. No, it’s just I don’t think he’s meant to hand out prints.
They’re all property of NASA, or the CIA more likely.
’ More smiles. ‘But he came back from his first mission a total convert to my cause. Because when you’re in space you realise we’re on a tiny blue planet filled with life in this vast, empty wilderness.
No one can comprehend how. Or why. But anyway—’ she stopped abruptly.
‘Mysteries of the universe aside, how about a cup of tea? Whatever you’d like, I’m sure I’ll have it. Come to the kitchen with me.’
Jo followed her through a doorway which had been extended to the height of the room.