by Carmen Reid
‘Who sent you the email?’ Jeff asked. ‘Don’t they know more?’
‘Ah well. . . ’ Jo maximized it so that the anonymous, no-reply address was revealed.
‘An anonymous email? You want me to jump through hoops for someone who won’t even leave you their name. Maybe it’s a red herring sent by your computer spies. Maybe you should just delete it and concentrate on the stories we do have, rather than worry about the ones we don’t.’
‘All right, all right.’ He did have a point. ‘Keep your hair on.’ But Jo had every intention of following up this lead. Hadn’t the last tip from this emailer worked out nicely? It had landed the second ‘vaccine victim’ in her lap.
‘What about the rest of your department?’ Jeff asked. ‘Have they managed to put anything together yet this week?’
Over Jeff’s shoulder, Jo could see Dominique and Aidan coming in through the office double doors.
‘They’re getting on nicely, but you can ask them yourself,’ she said.
Dominique gave a cool, upbeat appraisal of how her stories were going. Made it sound like she’d done as much research as a NASA scientist. The wind farms report was filed and when Jeff told them a double-page spread was likely, both Dominique and Aidan looked suitably pleased.
‘I’ll file the asthma and pollution story shortly,’ Dominique added.
‘Remind me of that one again,’ Jeff said, which prompted an ever so slight sigh from Dominique: ‘We’ve put asthma league tables, region by region, alongside air pollution league tables and got a lovely match.’
‘Oh yes. Aidan? Anything else to add to the list?’
Aidan was hanging his jacket over the back of his chair in his usual way, but Jo thought there was something of a flush to his face this morning. He’d either run to get to the office on time or he had some good news.
‘Well, I wasn’t going to say anything until. . .’ Aidan began.
‘Oh go on,’ Jeff prompted him. ‘Nothing a news editor hates more than being kept in suspense.’
‘Well. . .’ Aidan sat back in his chair and almost seemed to be enjoying his moment in the limelight, ‘I might have something interesting on Savannah Tyler – but I won’t know until this afternoon.’
‘Something interesting like?’ Jeff’s pen was hovering above his notebook.
‘I haven’t been told. Just “something very interesting”. My contact has promised to give me a call later.’ Jeff couldn’t help shrugging his shoulders. He’d heard it all before. Junior reporters desperate for a scoop, talking up every tiny nugget of information they could glean. Nothing went on his list until it was, well, something more than a something.
‘OK, good stuff,’ he encouraged Aidan. ‘You keep in close touch about this. But try and hurry it along if you can, because Jo is interviewing Savannah today, which is a big story for us. Any added extras would be most welcome.’
Jo watched the slight eye-widening going on. Dominique and Aidan were a little in awe, and more than a little jealous that she had finally pulled this one out of the bag.
‘She’s agreed to a full chat?’ Aidan asked.
‘Well, I’ll see when I get there,’ was Jo’s answer.
‘At her house?’ he added.
‘Yeah.’
‘Apparently it’s amazing. Totally eco, of course. Should be really interesting.’ He sounded so enthusiastic that, for a moment, Jo considered inviting him along. It would be a kind, generous thing to do. Wouldn’t it?
But no. Sorry. She wanted this one all to herself.
‘I need to look up all the cuttings on her, then I’ll be off,’ she told Jeff. ‘We’ll have to have a summit about vaccinations when I get back. I’ll put calls in, see if we can work it differently. What’s the word on the girl in the coma?’
Jeff thudded a tabloid onto her desk.
‘Not had time to see the papers yet then?’
Will Our Daughter Die?
was the front-page headline with a full-blown photograph of a beautiful dark-haired girl, two big front teeth half-grown into her smile, just exactly like Mel’s. Jo was surprised to feel tears welling.
‘Bloody hell,’ she said, very aware of how important it was for her to do the right thing here.
‘Yeah,’ Jeff agreed. ‘Take your time. You’ll work out how to play it, how to write it. . . Just try and do it by the end of the day.’
She shot him a sarcastic smile: ‘Thanks. I’ll have plenty of time to read the papers, cuttings and make the calls on the train.’
‘Train?!’ he asked.
‘Yup, that was part of the deal. I have to travel there and back by train. Savannah, as you might imagine, is just a teeny, weeny bit anti-car. And I have to take a bus to her house.’
‘And you’ve agreed to this?’ Jeff asked, smiling. ‘Just take a cab and get it to drop you off on the corner.’ he said, ‘She’ll never know.’
‘That’s hardly in the Green spirit, is it?’
‘She’s quite something, isn’t she?’ Aidan threw in.
‘Savannah?’ Jo asked.
When Aidan nodded a bit too dreamily, Jo couldn’t help adding: ‘Yes, certain men seem to fall quite helplessly under the spell of Savannah . . . and fortunately our editor is one of them.’
Chapter Fourteen
French scientists have created a mirror that will offer a reflection of the future, after years of binge drinking and junk food have taken their toll.
New Scientist
Friday: 10.35 a.m.
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, regularly shouting down the crackling line, ‘I’m on the train’, which was just embarrassing really.
Because she was desperate to make sure that Annette was OK, she put in a call to Simon and was pleasantly 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 just a bit of her ‘I should think so too’ indignation, she decided it would be best to call a truce, so she could pump him for any useful pathology contacts. She’d then 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 hoping to find out if anyone knew anything about the London and Middlesex Hospital pathology lab.
But then she also worried about what Jeff had said: anonymous email was dodgy. If Wolff-Meyer was spying on her, couldn’t they also send 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.
Well, Dr Taylor was genuine, wasn’t he? Someone was trying to tell her something, point her in the direction of something that she hadn’t got yet.
She folded the pages back into her file and turned to the other bundle of papers in her bag – print-outs of all the available Savannah Tyler cuttings. There wasn’t really very 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’ . . . all that kind of thing. Whatever she was involved in, there was always a big photo of Savannah. Press photographers were obviously drawn to her like bees to the proverbial honeypot. Well, hardly surprising, she looked so striking.
Jo took several minutes to do the ‘woman of 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 messy bun thing. She had a taste for floaty dresses, sturdy boots and exotic knitting.
In all the photos, she was wearing long,
elegant cardigans over dresses, 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, cool grey eyes and a wide mouth. Apart from the white streak, she looked about five years less than her newspaper-stated age of 37.
The later cuttings were all reports on public 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 little bit different here?’ she’d asked. ‘Green Queen? Green Dream?’
‘We’ll see. We’ll see what your big angle on her is going to be. It might give us a better headline. Jo, I will look into it,’ he said, when she didn’t appear very convinced by this. ‘I will personally supervise the sub in charge of the headline if it makes you happy. How about that?’ And then he’d shooed her out of the door to go and catch her train.
As the carriages clanked on through Reading and then on to Didcot, Jo realized how much she was looking forward to meeting Savannah in person. She’d heard about her, read about her, seen her on TV, but it would be intriguing to finally meet her.
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 a blizzard of green and purple climbers, tiny leaded window panes, shop fronts which didn’t look as if they’d changed since Victorian times, elaborate signs advertising cream teas on every corner, but soon the bus was moving on to the other side of town where the buildings grew smaller in scale, then fell off into 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 trailed off and a wide, old-fashioned English common opened out.
Jo had already double-checked her directions and knew she had to take the first left turn off the main road, walk for about five minutes, then third on the left and she would be there . . . at number 59.
Jo came to a small road of cheerful single-storey cottages with brightly coloured doors, abundant flowers and decorative pots in the front gardens, but still, number 59 wasn’t hard to spot. The cottage at the very end of the lane was all at once 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, the Oxford planning department was pretty open to new ideas; 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 that once in a while she found herself trying to open someone else’s front door with her key.
The first impression was of rampant, overgrown, over-spilling greenery. The front garden was full of plants, bushes and even two low 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, lots of things Jo couldn’t even identify.
In boxes tied to the cottage’s two small windows tomato plants, herbs and what looked like spinach were springing up.
But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the little house was its roof. Where the other houses in the street had dark slate tiles, the whole roof area of number 59 was entirely planted out in grass that had been allowed to grow long and tufted, apart from six square feet or so of sleek dark glass panels: Savannah’s power source, Jo guessed. Well, along with the swirling mini-windmills fixed to either end of the roof.
The cottage itself was built of unpainted stone and both the door and the window frames were stripped wood. Jo had barely set her hand on the plain, waxed wooden gate when the front door swung open and a woman she immediately recognized as Savannah issued a cheery ‘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 little cottage. How could someone so tall live in such a small house?
‘Jo Randall?’ Savannah asked in a clear, accentless voice, appealing and impossible to place. ‘I recognize you from your byline photo,’ she added. ‘Come in, come in . . . have you had an OK journey? Were my directions all right?’
Answering yes, smiling, do the shaking hands thing in the cramped little lobby at the top of the stairs, Jo was busy taking this woman in. She was very tall and much more handsome in the flesh than in the photos, with her striking face and dramatic flash of white hair, today partially tied back with a heavy 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 really good to meet you at last,’ Jo said, realizing how much she 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 crocheted cardigan. The effect was very green, obviously, but casually glamorous.
There was a flat seashell tied round her neck with a slim leather string and her face, bare of make-up but gleaming with moisturizer, was strong with a shapely, prominent nose, the soaring cheekbones and a friendly smile.
The lightly tanned skin barely crinkled round her eyes when she smiled and held onto Jo’s hand, warmly enfolding it in both of hers. ‘I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time. I like what you do,’ Savannah told her. ‘I like the way you make complicated issues easy to understand and you always question everything.’
‘Thanks.’ Jo withdrew her hand and smiled at the compliment. She 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, brilliant blue. It’s quite incredible. There’s something about seeing earth like this from space, which makes it overwhelming, scary . . . quite impossible to understand. Planet earth. My mission’s to save 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, making the decision there and then that she had to have one. The girls would love it.
‘A friend of mine’s an astronaut.’ Savannah laughed again, 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 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 MI6 or something.’ More smiles. ‘But he did come back from his first mission a total convert to my cause. Because when you’re out there in space you re
alize we’re on a tiny blue planet in this vast wilderness. No one can really comprehend how. Or why. But anyway -’ she stopped abruptly. ‘Mysteries of the universe aside, how about a cup of tea? Whatever kind you’d like, I’m sure I’ll have it. Come into the kitchen with me.’
Jo followed her through a doorway which had been extended to the height of the room.
‘Was the photographer OK?’ she asked, looking around. Fortunately, the ceilings in the cottage were higher than she’d expected, so Savannah, who must have been at least six foot two, didn’t have to stoop. In fact her posture was unusually upright and graceful for such a tall person. She moved slowly, calmly . . . purposefully. Calm strength. Those were the qualities she radiated, the words that sprang to Jo’s mind. With the height, the face, the bright knitted clothes and the silver accessories, Jo was reminded of photographs of Native American chiefs.
‘The photographer was fine,’ Savannah said, opening a cupboard entirely filled with boxes of tea: green tea, black tea, herbal tea, loose tea, bagged tea. As she’d said, every taste in tea could be accommodated.
‘He photographed me outside in the garden, then out on the common. He asked if I could wear something green -’ she gestured to her outfit. ‘So, all the usual thing, really.’ She flicked a smile, lifted the cover from something that looked like a hi-tech version of an Aga and set a full kettle of water on the surface.
‘What’s that?’ Jo asked.
‘This is my low-energy, smokeless fuel stove. It’s part electric. Run off the windmills on the roof.’
‘Right. . .’
‘And part run on recycled newspaper logs, which get burned in here, including Jo Randall articles.’ She pointed to the belly of the stove: ‘But there’s a special filter in the chimney, so it’s as clean as possible. Because, as you might have guessed, I’m an environmentally friendly freak! I’m also trying to live oil and gas free to make a point: this is the century in which the oil is predicted to run out and we’ve got to focus. Start conserving it and really thinking about what we’ll use instead.’