The Crow Trap (2 page)

She’d offered to drive out to the fork in the track to show the undertaker the way. Mr. Drummond had been very sweet considering the dreadful drive and the time of night. He had a round cherubic face and specs and said that suicides were always very upsetting. Then the doctor had to send for an ambulance to take Dougie away. He couldn’t stay in Black Law with no one to look after him. Perhaps the doctor was waiting for her to volunteer but she couldn’t face that, even for a day. She thought it would almost have been nicer for Dougie to go out with Mr. Drummond and Bella, but she could hardly suggest it.

“How was Mr. Furness?” Anne asked. “Did you have to tell him?”

Rachael thought Anne was enjoying the drama. She’d always been a bit of a drama queen.

“Of course,” she said. That was what Bella had wanted.

“Did he understand?”

“Oh yes.”

“How did he take it?”

“He cried.”

“Did you tell him that she’d killed herself?”

“No. Just that she was dead.”

She and the doctor had stood outside the farmhouse in the freshly scraped yard, watching the ambulance drivers lift Dougie out on the trolley. The doctor was shivering though she had stopped feeling cold.

“I suppose it was the strain,” Wilson had said. “Living all the way out here. Keeping the farm going and caring for Mr. Furness. It’s not as if she was born to it. I suppose something just snapped.” “No,” she’d said firmly. “Really. It couldn’t have been like that.

Bella loved Black Law. She enjoyed every minute of her time here.”

Then he gave her a pitying look, because he thought she couldn’t face up to the reality of the situation. For the first time she wondered what Bella had meant by not being able to take any more.

When the ambulance, the doctor and the undertaker had driven away in convoy she was left with the young policeman. He watched the tail lights of the other vehicles disappear into the darkness with a sort of wistfumess, as if he were being abandoned, then he said:

“Do you know if there’s any booze in the house?” She could tell he was eager to get inside, but that didn’t seem very professional even when he added: “I expect you could do with a drink.”

She found a bottle of whisky in the cupboard in the living room. They sat in the kitchen where it was warmer. He poured himself a drink without waiting to be asked and passed the bottle to her.

“What are you doing all the way out here?”

“Working.”

“You work for the Furnesses?”

“No, for an environmental agency. Peter Kemp Associates. We’re doing an Environmental Impact Assessment. We’ve been given permission to use the cottage down the track as a base.”

He looked blank.

“You’ve heard about the proposed quarry in the National Park?”

“Yes.” But his voice was uncertain. He sounded like a boy, optimistically trying to bluff his way through an unlearned lesson, so she told him. About the quarry, the planning application, the legal requirement for a survey to assess damage.

“We’ve been hired to do the survey and the report.”

“You stay all the way out here on your own?”

“Only tonight. My colleagues arrive tomorrow.” She looked out of the window at the lightening sky. “Today.”

“That’ll be Peter Kemp.”

“No. Peter doesn’t do much casework now. Anne Preece is a botanist.

Grace Fullweli’s a mammal expert.”

“Three lasses?”

“Three women.” “Oh aye.” He paused. “And you have to go out in the hills. Counting things?”

“Something like that. There’s a recognized methodology.”

“Isn’t it dangerous?”

“For women you mean?”

“Well, for anyone.”

“We leave a record of our route and the time we expect to be back at base. If there’s a problem the others can organize a search.”

“I’d not want to be out there without a radio.” He shuddered as if he felt suddenly cold. “I’d not want to be out there at all.”

She saw that he was prolonging the conversation so he didn’t have to set off up the track alone in the dark.

“You’re not a country boy,” she said.

“Does it show?” He grinned. “No. Newcastle born and bred. But Jan, the wife, thought the country would be a better place to bring up the bairn so I put in for transfer. Best thing I ever did.”

Though now, here in the wilds, he didn’t seem so sure. She’d guessed he was married. It wasn’t only the ring. He had a well cared for, pampered look.

“Shouldn’t you be getting back to them?” she said. “They’ll be wondering where you are.”

“No, Jan’s taken the bairn to visit his grandma. They’ll not be back until after the weekend.”

She felt jealous of this woman she’d never met. He so obviously missed her. And it wasn’t only the freshly ironed shirts and the meals. It was the empty bed and no one to chat to when he got home after work.

“You don’t mind answering some questions about Mrs. Furness? Now, I mean. It must have been a shock but I’ll need a statement sometime.” “No,” she said. “I’d rather get it over, then I can get some sleep before the others get here. What do you want to know?”

“Everything you can tell me about her.” I wonder if you’d say that, she thought, if your wife was at home. But she talked to him anyway, because she wanted to tell someone about Bella and what good friends they were. It was like a fairy story, she said. Bella coming out to the farm to look after Dougie’s mother and falling in love with it all, with Dougie and Black Law and the hills.

They’d married and they really had lived happily ever after, even after Dougie’s stroke.

“Why’d she kill herself then?”

She hadn’t been sure he’d been listening. It was the question which had been lying at the back of her mind all evening. “I don’t know.”

“But the note was her writing?”

“Oh yes. And not just the handwriting. The way the words were put together. It was like Bella talking.”

“When did you last see her?”

“November last year.”

“Well, that’s it then. Anything can happen in four months.”

“I suppose it can.” Though she had not thought Bella would ever change. And Bella would realize that she’d not be able to leave it at that. She’d know Rachael would have questions, that she’d not be able to settle until she found out what lay behind it. So why hadn’t she left her more to go on?

“I don’t like to leave you on your own. Is there anyone you can go and stay with?”

So I can keep you company, she thought, on the drive to the road.

“I’ll wait until the others arrive, then I might go to my mother’s, in Kimmerston.” She said it to get rid of him so he would realize she had family.

Someone to look after her. Afterwards she thought she might go home for a few hours. She’d sort out Anne and Grace in the cottage then she’d go to see Edie. Not for comfort though. Edie wasn’t that sort of mother.

Chapter Three.

Instead of using her key at the ground floor door she went down the steps and banged on the kitchen window. She didn’t want to appear suddenly in the kitchen from inside the house like a ghost or burglar.

Edie wouldn’t be expecting her back.

The door was opened, not by Edie, but by a middle-aged woman with dramatically dyed black hair, cut straight across her forehead in a Cleopatra style. She wore chunky gold earrings and a knitted tubular dress which reached almost to her ankles. The dress was scarlet, the same shade as her lipstick. There was also a child, a girl, denim-clad, bored and sulky. Rachael felt a stab of fellow feeling.

The room was filled with cigarette smoke. It was very hot. The couple must have been invited to an early supper because the table showed the remains of a typically Edie meal. There were pasta bowls brought back from a holiday in Tuscany, scraps of French bread, an empty bottle of extremely cheap Romanian red. Edie was making coffee in a blue tin jug. She looked up casually. People were always banging on the kitchen window.

“Darling,” she said. “Come in. And shut the door. It’s blowing a gale.”

Rachael shut the door but remained standing. “I have to talk to you.”

“Coffee?” Edie turned absent-mindedly. The kettle was still in her hand.

“Mother!” It was the only way she could think of to claim Edie’s attention. She never called Edie that.

Edie looked at her, frowned. “Is it urgent?”

“Yes. Actually, yes it is.”

With a competence, politeness and speed which astonished Rachael, Cleopatra and the daughter were dispatched. The coffee was never drunk.

“So sorry you had to go,” Rachael heard Edie say at the main front door as if their departure had been entirely their own idea.

When Edie returned to the kitchen Rachael had found another bottle of wine and was opening it. “I wish you wouldn’t let people smoke in here.”

“I know, dear, but she was desperate. Her husband’s just run off with one of his students.”

“And you discussed that here. In front of the daughter.”

“Not directly.” She grasped for a word: “Only elipt-ically. He used to teach with me in the college. I appointed him. I feel a certain responsibility.” “Of course.” This was said with an irony which Edie perfectly recognized.

She sat opposite Rachael at the scrubbed pine table and calmly accepted another glass of wine. Edie had recently retired but she had not let herself go. Despite the radical leanings which had so embarrassed Rachael in childhood she had always thought appearances mattered. Her short hair was well cut, her skin clear. She dressed well in an ageing hippy sort of way in long skirts, ethnic padded jackets. Rachael wondered if her mother had a lover at the moment. There had always been men when she was growing up but Edie had acted with discretion which bordered on the obsessive. Those men had never been welcome in the chaotic, crowded kitchen. It had been made quite plain to them that they would never encroach on Edie’s domestic life.

Edie looked up at Rachael over her glass.

“I hope,” she said carefully, ”re not here to go over old ground.”

Meaning her father.

“No.” “Then tell me,” Edie said very gently, ‘ you think I can help.”

Rachael drank her wine in silence.

“Is it boyfriend trouble?”

“Don’t be stupid. I’m not fourteen. Anyway, do you think I’d talk to you about something like that?”

“Well, yes. I hope you might.” Edie sounded regretful which made Rachael feel churlish, stupidly childish.

“Bella died,” she said. “Last night. She committed suicide by hanging. I found her.”

“Why didn’t you come back home before? Or phone? I’d have come out to you.” “I thought I could handle it.”

“That’s not the point. I’m sure you can.”

Rachael took a long time to answer.

“No,” she said. “Not on my own. Not this time.”

“Ah.” Edie drained her wine. It left a stain on her lips and the wide front teeth which Rachael had inherited. “Do you know, I always felt jealous of Bella. A bit. It doesn’t mean I’m not sorry now. Of course not. But I resented the way you were so close, the two of you.”

“You never met her, did you?”

“That made it worse. I imagined … it was the way you talked about her. I thought … “

“That I wished she was my mum?”

“Something like that.” “No,” Rachael said. “But we were friends. Real, close friends.”

“If you want to talk about her I can listen all night.”

“God no.” Wasn’t it typical of Edie and her friends that talking was seen as all that was needed? Throughout her childhood this house had been full of talk. She’d thought it was like a soup of words, drowning her. Perhaps that was why she liked numbers best, counting things.

Numbers were precise, unambiguous.

“What then?”

“I need to know why she did it.”

“We are certain that she meant it? It couldn’t have been an accident?

Murder even?”

Rachael shook her head. “The police came. And there was a note. It was her writing. And I explained to the policeman the words were put together as though she was speaking. Do you know what I mean?”

Edie nodded.

Of course, Rachael thought, you know all about words.

“She knew I was coming that night. If she had a problem she could have talked to me about it. Perhaps she thought I wouldn’t help.” “No, she wouldn’t have thought that.”

“I should have kept in touch over the winter. Then I’d have known. Do you realize I didn’t even phone her?”

“Did she phone you?”

“No.”

“You do know, don’t you, that guilt’s a common feature of bereavement?”

“Edie!”

Edie had taught English and Theatre Studies at the sixth form college, but had also been responsible for pastoral care. She’d attended courses on counselling. The regurgitated nuggets of psychology always irritated Rachael.

“I know,” Edie said unabashed. “Psycho babble. But it doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”