The Crow Trap (42 page)

There was no answer and when she pushed it, it was locked. She walked round to the back of the house, to the kitchen door.

There were blinds at the kitchen window. Outside the kitchen door was a black plastic dustbin. She lifted the lid and saw empty cans of soup and beans, squashed cartons of orange and milk, beer tins. They smelled, but not as if they’d been there for months.

At the Hall they had started to let off fireworks. A rocket cracked and exploded above her head. She turned the handle of the door and pushed. It opened and she went in.

Chapter Fifty-One.

Rachael could hear the fireworks from Baikie’s. Although it was still light she could see the coloured stars exploding above the horizon. She had taken a mug of tea outside because the cottage seemed so hot and airless and there was something unsettling about the boxes and bags stacked in piles in the living room.

Once Constance Baikie had held state there. As cut off from the rest of the world as a ship in the middle of the ocean, she had looked on as people, dressed up in smart clothes, laughed and danced to the wind-up gramophone. Many of the players in the present drama had been present at those parties Robert Fulwell, Neville Furness, Vera Stanhope. Now the room looked like a transit camp. The next day the cottage would be locked up, the key replaced under the stone urn and it would remain damp and empty until a group of undergraduates turned up in the summer.

Edie was restless too. She would have gone back to Kimmerston that night, but Vera and Joe Ashworth had invited themselves to the cottage for a farewell drink and she didn’t want to miss out. And then she wanted to have things out with Rachael. She’d kept her word and written down the story of Rachael’s father.

“It’ll be an anticlimax,” she said again as she handed over the sheets of paper, covered with round, even writing. It had become her justification for not passing on the information earlier that it was a story so uninteresting that it hardly merited telling. “If you imagine your father as an Edmund Fulwell, a drunken adventurer travelling the world in search of sensation, you’ll be disappointed.” The last line, of course, had been rehearsed.

Rachael refused to read it while Edie was there, hovering, waiting for a reaction, so she set it on the grass next to her mug and lay back in the deck chair to watch the fireworks, pale flares in an increasingly overcast sky. As soon as Edie went inside she picked the paper up.

She only had time to read the first line I met your father on April Fool’s Day when she was interrupted by Vera Stanhope and Joe Ashworth.

Vera was wearing a dress of the sort of material turned into stretch settee covers and advertised in the Sunday papers. Joe looked as if he were there on sufferance. He followed behind and carried a wicker picnic basket. They had come round the outside of the cottage straight into the garden.

Inside the basket was a plaid rug which Joe spread on the grass for Vera to sit on, a number of plates covered in tin foil and bottle of champagne.

“Is there something to celebrate?” Rachael asked. Vera was in a peculiarly jolly mood and Rachael wondered even if there had been an arrest, if Vera had met the deadline she had set herself. She returned the sheets of paper, face down, on the grass. She didn’t resent the interruption, realizing with surprise that she even felt relieved.

“Connie always drank champagne,” Vera said. “It seems right to honour the tradition.” She added wickedly, “And Joe’s wife has made us a cake. Not quite the same, but a nice thought.”

“Sal makes a lovely chocolate sponge,” Joe said, seeming not to realize that he was being got at. Or too laid back to care.

“She’ll be glad to have you home a bit more often.” Edie came out through the French windows with glasses, another bottle of wine and bags of crisps on a wonky tin tray.

“She’ll be lucky,” Vera said. “Just because you lot aren’t here doesn’t mean we won’t be. She’ll still have plenty of time for her baking.”

“I wonder what Miss. Baikie would make of all this.” Rachael got up to move the deck chair to a more upright position.

“The murder? She’d have loved every minute. She loved a drama.” Vera seemed lost in thought. Rachael expected another reminiscence of visits with her father but none came. “Where’s Mrs. Preece?”

“There’s a party at the Hall.”

“Hardly decent.” Joe was shocked. “The lass hasn’t long been buried.”

“The upper classes don’t go in much for decency,” Vera said. “Well, we’ll not wait for her or this bottle’ll get warm. You do the honours.” She winked at the other two. “Being as you’re the only man.”

But he seemed dubious. “I’ve never opened champagne before. Not the real stuff.”

“Give it here then. Don’t want you spilling it.” She had the bottle between her legs, had begun to turn it carefully, when her mobile phone rang.

“Bugger it,” she said. “Get that for me, Joe.”

He took the phone from her cardigan pocket and flipped it open. After the first words he stood up and took it inside. Vera apparently felt no curiosity. She opened the champagne with a dull pop and poured it into the glasses. “Just a splash for Joe,” she said. “He’ll be driving.”

Rachael, sipping, looked at the sergeant inside the house, talking earnestly. She had no intimation of tragedy as she had before Grace’s death. She thought he was probably talking to his wife. They were discussing what time he could reasonably expect to get home. She was passing on news of the little boy. He snapped the phone shut and came to the French windows.

“Can I have a word, ma’am?”

“What’s up with you?” Vera was sitting on the rug, legs apart, skirt pulled above her knees. The glass was already empty. “Relax, man, I’m not ready to go yet.”

“It’s not that.”

“Well, what is it? Spit it out.”

He hesitated, looked at Rachael and Edie. “There was a 999 call from Holme Park.”

“And?” She saw him looking at the other women. “For God’s sake, man, whatever it is they’ll find out sooner or later.”

“A body.”

“Who?”

“No positive ID.”

She was on her feet looking down at Rachael. “You’ll have to wait,” she said. “That’s the hardest thing of all. As soon as I find out what’s going on I’ll send someone tell you. I promise. I’ll leave Joe here until someone can relieve him. Or do you want to go back to Kimmerston?”

“No,” Rachael said. “We’ll wait.”

“Inside then. Just in case.”

Rachael sat in Constance Baikie’s chair, surrounded by black bin bags and read about her father. At one time she would have thought it the most important thing in her life. Now it was a distraction and she had to force herself to concentrate. It began to rain large heavy drops which rattled like shingle against the window. She saw that they’d left the rug on the grass but Joe wouldn’t let her outside to bring it in.

Chapter Fifty-Two.

Vera Stanhope sat on the plaid rug on the grass in front of Baikie’s, gulped champagne and remembered quite clearly the last time she had seen Constance Baikie alive. She was tempted to recount the event to Rachael and Edie because she knew they liked to hear her stories.

Perhaps the taste in her mouth brought the scene back so vividly because they had been drinking champagne that day too. Though Constance was so ill that they had had to hold the glass for her. They had propped her up on the sofa with pillows but by then she was so large that her flesh spread, jelly-like, over the edge of it and she looked in danger of overbalancing and falling off. Vera had come to the cottage with her father. She had driven him in her car because by that time he was getting on too. The week before she had been working nights and she was exhausted. A day with her father always sapped her energy but he had been determined to make the trip and even then, towards the end of his life, he could impose his will on her. Besides, she didn’t want him to visit Connie on his own. It wasn’t only that she was concerned for his safety, she was worried about what he might get up to.

Because her father had been an addict. She hadn’t explained that to the women when she told stories about her childhood in the hills. She hadn’t described her growing understanding of what her father was really after when he took her walking, when he pointed out the nests of skylarks and wheat ears made her watch the peregrine swooping on its prey. Her father had been an inveterate and compulsive stealer of birds’ eggs. Not in the way that a schoolchild might be. For him it was an obsession and a business. It had funded his retirement. She had come to realize, as a child, that she was there as a cover. At dangerous sites, protected by wardens and electric fences, he had even sent her in to steal the eggs.

It wouldn’t have done for an ambitious young detective to see her father in court in contravention of the Wildlife and Countryside Act so she never liked him going into the hills on his own. He swore he had given up collecting but she’d never believed a word he said. Addicts always lied. And even if it was true on his own account, Connie Baikie had always been able to twist him round her little finger. She shared his compulsion. She might be too old and sick to get into mischief now but Hector, Vera’s father, was devoted and would have done anything for the old woman.

The champagne had been his idea. “A treat for the old girl,” he had said. Vera had thought he knew Connie was dying and especially wanted to keep her sweet because he had an eye on her collection. His own was extensive enough. It was kept in locked mahogany cases, each egg held safely in a nest of cotton wool in the spare room, hidden inside an ugly mahogany wardrobe. Vera was supposed not to know about this secret, though most nights he’d shut himself into the room like a dirty old man with a hoard of porn.

Connie’s collection he had leered at and salivated over openly since Vera was a child. Even after the Wildlife Act it had been kept in full view. Occasionally Connie saw Vera looking at the display cabinets.

“They’re quite legal,” she’d say, coughing and panting to get out the words, defying Vera to contradict her. “Collected before the Act was passed.”

Vera, though, had seen new trays added and would have investigated the origins of the collection if it hadn’t been for the Hector connection.

Better not to know.

So they had been in Baikie’s, drinking champagne, silently pondering over the distribution of Connie’s collection after death when there had been an intrusion, a small drama which had perked up the old girl no end. According to Hector the incident had probably kept her going for several extra weeks.

A woman had run into the garden and banged on the French windows. This wasn’t unusual in itself. Walkers occasionally violated Connie’s privacy, asking for water, directions, even to use the lavatory.

Sometimes Connie was gracious, usually she sent them away with a flea in their ear. But this woman was frantic. She banged on the door, hammering with her fist so Vera was afraid she’d break the glass and cut herself.

It was spring. There had been deep snow that year, recently melted, so the burn was very full and fast flowing. Vera could hear the noise of the flood water even above the woman’s hysterical words as she opened the door.

From her position on the sofa Connie couldn’t quite see into the garden and, afraid of missing out on the excitement, ordered Vera to bring the visitor into the room. Stricken, bored, she smelled entertainment. The woman was in her early thirties and seemed unsuitably kit ted out for a walk in the hills. She wore make-up, leggings, white shoes with a heel. Her words tumbled out in a senseless flow.

“What is the matter, my dear?” Connie wheezed, oozing concern. “This lady’s a police officer. I’m sure she’ll be able to help.”

At that the woman took Vera by the arm and dragged her outside to join the search for her baby. That was what the scene was about a lost child. They had driven out from Kimmerston to see the little lambs.

The woman whose name was Bev thought they were really cute and Gary, the new man in her life, had suggested making a day of it. They’d parked on the track just before the gate into the Black Law farmyard and had a picnic. There was a cold wind so they’d stayed in the car where the sun was lovely. They’d let Lee out to play. What harm could he come to, out here in the country? It wasn’t like the town with perverts and madmen lurking behind every lamp-post. Was it?

They must have fallen asleep, Bev said. Vera, noting the tousled appearance, thought this was a euphemism for something more energetic.

Then the next time they looked, Lee had disappeared.

Vera walked back with Bev to the car, reassuring her all the time that by then the two-year-old would surely have turned up again. But at the car there was no sign of him. Gary seemed a pleasant lad, genuinely distraught. He was very young. In the street he could have passed for Lee’s older brother rather than a potential stepfather.

“I’ve shouted myself hoarse,” he said. “And hit the horn. I don’t know what else to do.”

Vera left them there, went back to Black Law and got Dougie to phone for a search party. She and Dougie walked the hill until help arrived.

When she returned to Baikie’s Connie insisted on having everything described to her. The boy, the boyfriend, the mother’s tears. She and Hector seemed to have reached an understanding in Vera’s absence, because a few days later the collection of raptors’ eggs were delivered to the house in Kimmerston. They joined the stock of trays in the spare-room wardrobe. The day after her father died Vera burnt them all, without opening the cases to look, on a huge pyre in the garden, along with his notebooks.