The Crow Trap (9 page)

“Just a minute,” he said. “I’ll phone you back from somewhere quieter.”

Five minutes later the phone rang, sounding very loud in the empty house. He was brisk, assertive. He had been in touch with the mountain rescue team though he didn’t think they’d do much before first light. It wasn’t as if Grace had been anywhere dangerous. Not like rock-climbing or pot-holing.

“She wasn’t a reckless type, was she?” “No,” Rachael said. “I wouldn’t have thought so.” He said it was a mild night and even if there’d been an accident she’d survive until morning, but anyway the team would soon be on its way. It was up to them to decide how to play it. A clue to his promptness came at the end of the conversation.

“The Health and Safety won’t be able to get us on this, will they? All the procedures were in order?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well then, we should be able to face it out. Whatever happens.”

What happened was that six burly men turned up in a Land Rover. They were good-looking in a rugged, muscle-bound way. Anne, who had eaten a plate of casserole, finished the wine and gone to bed, would be sorry to have missed them, Rachael thought. One of the team was the doctor who had pronounced Bella dead and taken Dougie away.

“You’re having a dramatic time of it,” he said, as if he envied her.

Perhaps that was what being a GP was about for him. It entitled him to star in his own action movie.

They went out onto the hill just before dawn. With such a detailed record of Grace’s movements they said they would easily find her. Even if she’d strayed away from her planned route there’d be no problem. The doctor carried a folded stretcher which poked out of the top of his rucksack.

Rachael watched them from her bedroom window. They didn’t invite her to go with them and she didn’t like to suggest it. The cloud was still thick and low, with a drizzle, so they soon disappeared. She must have dozed, although she was sitting upright in a chair, because she was suddenly aware of their return. She looked at her watch. They’d been gone for two hours. There were four of them, walking in single file.

The doctor still had the poles of the stretcher poking above his shoulder but she couldn’t see Grace.

She went into the kitchen and put on the kettle. Before going they had made jokes about having the tea ready on their return. The gas was so slow that she was still there when they came in. There was hardly room for them all to stand in the tiny kitchen. She could feel their heat after the walk, smell the wax on their boots.

“Did you find her?” Then this seemed a ridiculous question because Grace obviously wasn’t there. “I suppose the others are still searching.”

“We found her,” the doctor said.

“How is she?”

“She’s dead.”

It was, she thought, like Bella all over again. I know now, she thought, what it’s like to be mugged. You’re kicked. It hurts. You think it’s over, roll away, gather yourself to get up, then someone comes at you and kicks again. And all the time you know it’s your own fault.

“How?”

“We can’t say,” the doctor replied. “Not yet.” As he put his arms round Rachael to support her she wondered, bitterly, if this was excitement enough for him.

Anne

Chapter Eleven.

From the moment she saw Grace outside Kimmerston station Anne knew that they weren’t going to get on. Something about the skinny bitch got right up her nose. Something about the way she sat there, staring straight ahead of her as if nothing in the world deserved her interest, as if she was the only person who mattered. Anne shouldn’t have had to provide the taxi service in the first place. Peter had been going to do it but he’d phoned her at the last minute and turned on the charm which, according to gossip, had turned on the frigid Rachael, but which didn’t work on her.

“Well,” she’d said, ”s hardly on my way.” Because she lived in Langholme, the nearest village to the study site and Kimmerston was thirty miles away.

“Come on, Anne. You don’t really mind, do you?”

“I’ll be putting in a claim for the petrol.”

She hadn’t felt she could refuse. Not at the moment.

She’d cut it a bit fine and was ten minutes late arriving at the station. Grace was already waiting outside. It was midday and the station was deserted, unkempt. Last year’s hanging baskets were still full of brown moss and dry stalks and a couple of empty coke cans lay in the gutter. Anne thought viciously of what she’d like to do to kids who threw litter around. Grace must have realized that this was her lift but when the car pulled up she didn’t move from the wrought iron bench where she was sitting. She was lost, apparently, in a world of her own. Or perhaps she just couldn’t be bothered to shift her arse. Anne had to wind down the window and yell, “Are you waiting for Peter Kemp?”

Then Grace uncoiled her long legs and stood up. Not hurrying, though Anne was waiting with the engine revving. Anne got out and opened the boot and Grace dumped in her rucksack without a word, without even a smile.

Sod you then, Anne thought, but she wore politeness automatically, like the very expensive perfume her lover provided. She held out her hand across the gear stick.

“Anne Preece,” she said. “I’m the botanist.”

“Grace Fulwell, Mammals.”

“Not one of the Fulwells?” Anne said jokingly, because clearly Grace couldn’t be one of the Fulwells or she’d have heard of her. “Holme Park Hall? Lords of all they survey.”

Grace looked at Anne strangely.

Supercilious cow, Anne thought. She had come across people like Grace before. They got a couple of degrees then believed they were better than anyone else. It didn’t help that she was a good ten years younger than Anne and now she said, “Sorry. Why should you have heard of them if you’re not local? The Fulwells are a big family in this part of the county. They own most of the Uplands. Or that’s how it seems.”

“Do they?”

“Mm. They’re neighbours of mine. Sort of.”

Grace turned away with a pained expression. “Oh,” she said, “I see.”

“Have you come far?” “Just from Newcastle. Today.” Which really told Anne nothing.

On the way to Baikie’s Anne tried to make conversation but was answered in monosyllables, so she, too, lapsed into silence. They were driving through Langholme when Grace suddenly sat upright. It was as if she’d woken with a start from a deep sleep.

“Where is this place?” she demanded.

Anne told her.

“Langholme?” She sounded astonished, disbelieving.

“I should know, I’ve lived here for ten years.”

“It’s just that it’s not what I expected,” Grace muttered.

“What did you expect?”

“I don’t know, something smarter, I suppose. Something prettier.”

“God, where would you get that idea?”

There was nothing pretty about Langholme. The terraced houses were built along a ridge, exposed to the northerly wind. The pub’s paintwork had faded as if it had been sandblasted and at the garage the petrol pumps had rusted. The place had more in common with the Durham pit villages to the south than with pictures advertising the National Park in the Northum-bria Tourist brochure.

“Of course,” Anne went on, realizing at once how defensive she must sound, ‘ don’t actually live in the village.”

And as the road dipped past the church and a belt of woodland at last provided some shelter, Anne pointed out the Priory. The marital home.

The pale stone of the house was partly hidden by trees, but there was a perfect view of the garden. Anne slowed the car so Grace could admire it. Even so early in the season it was looking bloody good. It had taken ten years of hard labour but it had been worth the effort. Grace hardly looked up.

And Holme Park Hall?” she asked. “Where is that?”

Anne ignored her. She had to concentrate anyway on the OS map. She’d never driven to Black Law before. The other contracts she’d worked for Peter Kemp had been on the coast and she and Jeremy weren’t really on socializing terms with Bella and Dougie Furness. They didn’t mix in the same circles. If Bella and Dougie mixed at all. In the village they had something of the reputation of keeping themselves to themselves. Bella wasn’t in the WI and she never went to church.

Though thinking about that now, Anne remembered that she had seen Bella in church once.

She had a sudden picture of the woman hunched in a big coat on the back pew, her breath coming in clouds, tears streaming down her cheeks. It must have been last Christmas, the kids’ Nativity play, the usual thing out of tune Away in a Manger’, Mary and Joseph awe struck by stardom, the angels fidgeting with their glitter wings and tinsel haloes. It was always a tear-jerker. Even Anne occasionally wondered at Christmas if she’d missed out by not having kids.

Presumably that was what had got to Bella too. By the time she’d met Dougie she must have been a bit old to think about starting a family.

Though in Anne’s opinion that was hardly an excuse for making a show in public, and she’d been glad when Bella had rushed away straight after the service so she’d not be forced to speak to her.

When they got to Baikie’s Anne forgot all about Bella for a moment.

Rachael was waiting for them. She looked exhausted, as if she’d slept in her clothes. The fire hadn’t been lit so there was no hot water.

Anne looked at her with irritation.

“God,” she said. “You look dreadful!”

Rachael wiped her face with her sleeve like a snotty lad and announced to them both that Bella was dead, that she’d hanged herself in the barn. The image of the middle-aged woman in tears at the back of the church returned to Anne, and though she wasn’t usually superstitious she did think it was a bit spooky that she’d pictured her so clearly on the way to the farm and wondered if it was some sort of premonition.

She didn’t rush into the field the next day. She’d never been at her best in the morning and it wasn’t like birds. The plants weren’t going anywhere.

She’d looked at the large-scale maps and knew approximately where she wanted to site her hundred-metre squares. Peter had provided satellite landscape surveys, but they needed ground-truthing. She loved the idea of ground-truthing, the thought of bending close to the soil, of getting things right.

She walked through the farmyard quickly she wasn’t squeamish but she didn’t want to be reminded of Bella swinging from a rope in the barn and went up the track towards the ford. In the sheltered bank by the side of the track there were primroses in bud and violets and the sun felt warm on her back. From a rise in the land she had a view of the old lead mine and thought it would be interesting to survey a square close to there. Old lime spoil could encourage quite a different sort of vegetation. But today she wanted to find the area of peat bog which Peter had marked on the map as being worth surveying. She left the track and walked over the open hillside. She was out of sight of the road and the mine and the farmhouse. She couldn’t even see any electricity pylons.

There was a specific way of going about the survey. It wasn’t a matter of wandering over the hill with a trowel and a magnifying glass.

When she’d first got involved in this business she’d scorned the rules, thought they’d been put together by empire-building scientists who wanted to keep the amateurs out. Then Peter had sent her on a course about National Vegetation Classification and she’d started to see the point.

Each survey area was a hundred-metre square, and within that five wooden frames, each two metres square, known as quad rats were randomly placed. You ensured a random distribution by standing in the middle of the large square and throwing the first quadrat, going to where it landed and throwing the next until all five were on the ground. The five frames provided the area for study.

Today she wouldn’t have time to do more than mark out the hundred-metre square with the poles she was carrying in her rucksack but that was what she liked best, the detailed investigation, identifying the plants within the frames, recording their abundance. She loved teasing through the sphagnum moss for plants like cranberry, bog rosemary, bog asphodel, squatting so close to the ground so she could smell the peat, feel the insects on her fingers. And always hoping for something unusual, something perhaps which she’d have difficulty in identifying.

Something which would put the bloody scientists in their places.

Not that there was much chance of that on this contract, she thought, pushing a pole into the ground, putting all her weight behind it because she didn’t want it blowing away in the first gale. This bit of bog might be of interest but from what she knew of the rest of the estate she wasn’t expecting any dramatic finds. Most of the mires had long been drained and the land farmed by the Holme Park tenants had been grazed so close by sheep and rabbits that it was as smooth and green as a billiard table. She wasn’t sure why the project needed a botanist at all. But perhaps that had been Godfrey Waugh’s idea.

As she straightened, the valley was filled with noise as a fighter plane from R. A.F Boulmer screamed overhead, so low it seemed that if she’d reached up she would have been able to feel the air move across her fingertips.

Chapter Twelve.

Anne Preece first saw Godfrey Waugh, Chairman of Slateburn Quarry Ltd, at a meeting held in St. Mary’s Church Hall, Langholme. It had been called by the developers to explain their scheme. There had, they said, been a lot of wild speculation in the press and when the villagers appreciated the real nature of the new quarry, they might actually be in favour of it.