The Crow Trap (3 page)

“Really. I don’t need all that.”

“I’m not entirely sure what it is you do need.”

“Practical help. I need to find out what drove Bella to suicide. While I’m out at Black Law I can’t do that. Besides, it’s what you’re good at. Talking. Listening. Gossip even. Someone must have some idea why she felt she had to kill herself.”

“Would she want you to do that? It seems … an invasion of privacy.”

“She arranged for me to find her. She knew me. She knew I’d ask questions.”

“Well then, where do we start?” Edie had used the same question when, occasionally, they had taken the bus together for the long trek into Newcastle. They had stood at the Haymarket looking down Northumberland Street at the heaving shops. Rachael had always preferred open spaces and felt overwhelmed, panicky, but Edie’s approach to shopping had been methodical.

“Well then, where do we start?” And she had taken out her list and organized the day: Farnons for school uniform, Bainbridge’s for curtain material, lunch in the studenty cafe opposite the Theatre Royal, M & S for knickers and socks and back to the Haymarket for the three o’clock bus.

Again Rachael was reassured. “I thought the funeral.”

“Who’s arranging that?”

“Neville, Dougie’s son. I had to let them know what had happened, though it didn’t occur to me at first. I never thought of him having any connection with Bella. She didn’t talk about him much. But of course he had to know about Dougie, and there’s the farm to see to.

They’re just coming up to lambing … “

“And he took responsibility for the funeral.” “Yes, he said he’d like to. I asked if he’d mind if I put a notice in the Gazette. She was well thought of by the other hill farmers. Some of her friends or family might see it and turn up.” She turned to Edie. All that time and I really knew nothing about her. I don’t know if her parents are still alive, if she has brothers or sisters, even where she was born. We talked and talked about me, but about her it was only Dougie and the farm. Neville asked if there were relatives he should notify and I couldn’t tell him.”

“Couldn’t Dougie help?”

“I never knew about Dougie. Bella chatted to him in exactly the same way as before the stroke, but I sometimes thought she was deluding herself that he understood it all. He certainly responded to simple questions. “Do you want a drink?”

“Shall I open a window?” But beyond that?” She shrugged. And perhaps she never told him much about her past either. He loved her so much he wouldn’t have cared.”

“Where’s Dougie living now?”

“A nursing home. Rosemount. Do you know it?”

“Mm. I know the night sister. I taught her son. There were problems.

I was able to help a bit. So … “

“She owes you a favour?”

“She might be able to help a bit too?”

“I suppose you think I’m crazy,” Rachael said. They were almost at the bottom of the bottle. “You probably think I should accept she’s dead and get on with things. Why dredge up the past, right?”

“Could you do that? Just turn your back on it?”

“No.”

“Then what’s the point in asking the question?”

Rachael was on her way to bed when Edie asked: “It couldn’t have anything to do with the quarry?”

“What do you mean?” “You said she loved the hills. Could she bear a great scar cut across them, explosives, lorries. I know it’s not on her land but she’d see it, wouldn’t she? Every day.”

“She’d hate it but she wouldn’t just give up. She’d fight it. Lie down in front of the bulldozers if she had to.”

“But if she knew, in the end, none of that would do any good?”

“How could she know that? We haven’t started work yet. Until we’ve finished our work, until the public inquiry, no decision can be made.

And it wouldn’t have mattered as much as being with Dougie. In the end that was all she cared about.”

Chapter Four.

Rachael worked from a large scale map. She had already chosen her survey areas using the natural boundaries shown on the map. Neither sample was on Black Law land. One, a patch close to the burn and the disused lead mine, was heavily grazed. It was farmed by one of the Holme Park tenants, almost denuded of heather. It would be easy for walking but not, she suspected, very interesting for birds. The other was a piece of heather moorland, managed for grouse. It had been leased by the Holme Park Estate to a syndicate of Italian businessmen.

She suspected they would not find the shooting so enjoyable with the industrial noise of the quarry in the background, but she presumed that Slateburn Quarries had offered the estate such a tempting deal that income from the shooting rights would hardly be missed.

The lowland square was easy to plot. The Skirl formed one boundary.

The other two were fences put up to keep in the sheep, which met at a right angle. The fourth was the remains of a track which led on past Baikie’s, crossed the burn by a simple bridge and continued to the mine. On the map she drew lines, parallel with the burn, which crossed the survey square. On the ground these transects would be 200

metres apart. She would walk them, counting all the birds she heard or saw. This was the system known as the Kemp Methodology.

The moorland patch was less easy to define. The map showed drainage ditches, a dry stone wall, but even in good visibility she knew it would be hard to keep to the transect lines in such a featureless landscape. Some surveyors were sloppy. They seemed to think a slight variation from the map was hardly significant. Rachael was obsessive about accuracy. She despised estimated counts and counts which were hurried. She refused to work if the weather conditions would affect the outcome of the count. She would accept drizzle but never wind.

Wind kept the birds low and drowned the call of the waders.

The morning of her return from Edie’s she arrived too late to take a count, which had to start at dawn and be completed in three hours. It was such a still day, clear, more like June than April, that she regretted for a moment having stayed away. She had expected Anne and Grace to be out already, taking advantage of the weather to begin their own work, but they were still at Baikie’s. There was the smell of bacon and coffee. Grace was in the living room working on a map stretched over the floor but Anne was sitting on a white wrought iron bench outside the kitchen door, her face turned to the sun. She waved her mug at Rachael.

“Help yourself to coffee. There should be some in the pot and it’s still warm. I brought my own. Can’t stand instant.” She threw a piece of bacon rind from her plate onto the grass.

“You shouldn’t feed birds at this time of year,” Rachael said. “It’s not good for the young.”

“Sorry, Miss.” She grinned. Rachael felt herself blushing and turned into the kitchen. The place was a mess. The plates of the previous night’s meal had not been washed. She tried to ignore it.

“I’m going up to check my moorland square,” she called to Anne outside.

“I’m not sure yet that all the boundary features are visible. Are you planning to go out?”

“I’m just working up to it.”

“You will clear this up first.” She regretted the words as soon as they were spoken. They made her sound like a girl guide leader. Anne must have heard them but she didn’t answer. When Rachael walked past her on her way to the hill she was still sitting in the sun, her eyes closed but she didn’t say goodbye.

On the wall by the side of the track there were three wheat ears flicking their tails to show white rumps. Each year Bella had pointed out the first wheatears. “Black and white,” she’d said once to Rachael. “Winter colours. It seems wrong they should come in the spring. It’s the same with ring ouzel. Still, I suppose it’s never far from winter up here.”

Rachael had suggested once that Bella might like to go on holiday.

Somewhere hot with strong bright colours. Social services would organize respite care for Dougie. But Bella had been horrified by the suggestion. “I couldn’t leave him,” she’d said. “I’d miss him too much. How could I enjoy myself, wondering what they were doing to him?”

“Wouldn’t Neville come for a while?”

“He might. But he’s not used to Dougie. It wouldn’t do.”

The track crossed the stream and came to the old lead mine. The estate had talked once of doing it up, turning it into a living museum, but nothing had come of it. Soon there would be little left to preserve.

There was still a chimney but it was crumbling from the top, eaten into by the weather, so the brickwork seemed to unravel like a piece of knitting. There had been a row of cottages to house the workers but only one still had a roof. There was the smell of stale water and decay. By the door of the old engine house she saw a posy of flowers lily of the valley and pale narcissi. She thought a child had been raiding Baikie’s garden while being dragged out for a walk, then remembered she had seen flowers there on other occasions.

If Godfrey Waugh had his way this site would be the nerve centre of the new quarry. It proved, he said, that the hills had always had an industrial use too. They weren’t just there for tourists to gawp at.

The houses would be demolished and replaced by a structure more in keeping with the nature of the operation, a building with clean lines, made of glass and local stone. Rachael had seen an artist’s impression of the proposed block. It appeared low and inconspicuous, built into the hill. Through the large windows you could see sketches of women sitting at computer terminals. There were landscaped surroundings, a belt of newly planted trees. No pictures had been shown of the quarry itself, of the blasting and the lorries and the machines with claws and diggers. There were, though, details of the plan to renovate the mine chimney. According to the PR men, it would be a symbol of continuity.

Already it appeared on the company logo.

From the mine Rachael broke away from the track and took the direct climb to the top of Hope Crag.

From there she could lock onto her moorland survey square. The land sloped gently in a series of plateaux to the horizon, which was softened by woodland around Holme Park House and the village of Langholme. The keeper had been burning heather in rotation to provide a supply of new green buds for the red grouse. There were strips and patches in different stages of growth. It was the habitat she most enjoyed working. She lay on her stomach looking down on it. There was a soft westerly breeze blowing into her face and all around her was the song of meadow pipit, skylark and curlew.

She saw at once that it would be as difficult to define the survey area as she had anticipated but now she considered that only a challenge.

There was a straight drainage ditch which would mark one boundary and a wall, collapsed in places, which would do as another. The rest she would have to manage with map and compass. Not many surveyors could achieve satisfactory accuracy by this method but she would.

The knowledge gave her confidence. She got up quickly and began to walk down the crag, leaning back into the slope and kicking her heels into the heather to make better progress, towards a block of conifers.

There was a path through the Forestry Commission plantation which would take her almost into the Black Law farmyard. It was possible that Anne Preece was still at Baikie’s working on the maps and Rachael wanted to set things straight between them. It wouldn’t do to let resentment simmer. Edie, of course, would have known exactly what to say. She always made too much of these differences, or not enough, but still she was the project leader and it was her responsibility to sort it out.

She came down the slope at such a pace that at the bottom she had to stop for a moment to catch her breath before setting off across the damp area of junco us and cotton grass towards the trees. She crouched and stretched to ease the muscles in her legs, then turned back for a last look at the crag.

Someone was there, standing just where Rachael had been lying on her stomach minutes before. It hardly seemed possible that she had not seen them approaching. She had been looking out over the fell so they must have followed her up the path from the lead mine, but quietly, not making their presence known. Rachael was looking into strong sunlight so the figure appeared only as a silhouette next to the outcrop, almost as another finger of rock. It stood very still, apparently staring directly down at Rachael. She was reminded suddenly of the man who had been on the hill on the evening of Bella’s suicide. The disturbing sensation of being watched returned.

But she had the impression that this was a woman. The shape, blocked against the sun, was of a woman with short hair, or hair pulled away from her face, wearing a full skirt over boots. For one fanciful moment Rachael thought of Bella, who’d always preferred skirts to trousers and often wore them with Wellingtons around the farm. Rachael had slung her binoculars over her shoulder for the yomp down the hill.

Now, after freezing for a moment, surprised by the figure, she twisted her arm out of the strap and raised them to her eyes, but in that moment of focusing the woman must have moved behind the pile of rocks.

There was nothing but the crag, with a wheatear in the shadow, hopping on one of the boulders.

It must have been a walker, she thought, or Anne come to make her peace with me. Though Anne, like Grace, had been wearing jeans.