Ann Cleeves - The Crow Trap

Rachael guessed that she’d arranged to meet a man. Anne’s sexual appetite was legendary, and she was wearing a little black dress and jacket which would do just as well for a discreet dinner as for the draughty crematorium. Rachael could tell she was itching to get away as soon as they were outside.

“Where shall I meet you?” she asked.

Anne hesitated. “Look, I’m not sure what’s happening. I quite fancy a night in my own bed. I’ll get Jeremy to drop me off at Baikie’s first thing tomorrow.”

It took Rachael a while to remember that Jeremy was Anne’s long-suffering husband.

Guests at the White Hart were even thinner on the ground than at the crematorium. Godfrey Waugh stayed briefly. He had a short, intense conversation with Neville which had more, Rachael thought, to do with business than with Bella. His wife had not appeared at all.

A buffet lunch had been laid on a table against one wall. There were thick slices of cooked ham and beef, bowls of lettuce, slices of hard-boiled egg, metal ice cream bowls of a thin salad dressing which looked partly curdled. Bella’s farming friends ate with relish. The hotel had provided thimble-sized glasses of sherry and whisky, but the men disappeared to the bar and returned with pints. Neville had gone to school with their sons and daughters, but they didn’t treat him with the familiarity which Rachael would have expected. In contrast Edie moved easily among them, listening to the conversation, chatting, asking about children who’d been through her class at the sixth form college.

Peter and Amelia turned up eventually. There was a frostiness between them which made Rachael think they’d had a row in the car. Amelia made a show of ignoring the food, then disappeared into the ladies’.

“You see,” Peter said. “I came. You know I always take your advice.” Christ, Rachael thought, was I really taken in by that sort of thing?

His eyes wandered over her shoulder and she realized he was checking that they could not be overheard. “What made you think I was at Bella’s the afternoon she died?”

“Nothing. It was a silly mistake.” He her but she wouldn’t say any more. At last he seemed satisfied.

Of the ugly woman with the bags there was no sign. Rachael stayed longer than she otherwise would have done, expecting the stranger to make a dramatic late entrance as she had at the crematorium. She asked around, but no one seemed to know who the woman was. Then she realized that Dougie too was missing and thought perhaps the woman was a relative of his, that they were spending some time together.

She was just about to gather up Edie to go when she was startled by a touch on the shoulder. She turned sharply to find Neville so close to her that she could see a stray white hair in his beard, smell the soap he had used.

“I’m glad you were able to come,” he said. “You are Rachael? I wasn’t sure you’d be able to face it. Not after… “

She interrupted him quickly, not because he seemed in the slightest embarrassed but because there was a real point to be made. “I couldn’t have missed it. We were real friends, Bella and I.”

“She used to talk about you.”

“Did she?” Rachael was surprised. She hadn’t realized there’d been that much contact between Neville and Bella.

“Oh yes.” Because he was short for a man she looked almost straight into his eyes. “Had you been in touch lately?”

“No.” “Ah, I thought you might have some idea why… “

“No.”

“I was fond of her, you know. I was very young when Mum died. I was glad when Dad found someone else. I was pleased for them.”

“Of course.” Bella had never mentioned him much at all, but that hardly seemed an appropriate thing to say. “How is your father?”

For the first time he seemed embarrassed. “How can anyone know?”

“Bella always seemed to.”

“Did she? I thought that was self-delusion. Her way of facing it. I can’t, you know. Face it. Not really. That’s why I’ve been so bad about visiting lately.”

“Is someone from the nursing home giving him a lift?”

She hoped he might put a name to the woman with the bags but Neville said sharply: “He’s not coming here. He’s gone straight back to Rosemount. They say he’s better keeping to a routine.”

“I see.” Rachael hoped that Neville had at least asked Dougie if he wanted to be ferried straight back to the home. Dougie always enjoyed a party, even after his illness. They’d had a do at Baikie’s at the end of her project. Peter had been there, and all the other students.

One of the boys had brought a violin. Bella had wrapped Dougie up and wheeled him down the track to the cottage. Rachael could picture him, watching the dancing, his eyes gleaming, beating time with his good hand to the fiddle music.

Rachael and Edie stood outside the White Hart Hotel. Rachael’s attention was distracted for a moment by a black car which drove past them up the street. She thought she recognized Anne Preece sitting in the passenger seat but didn’t see the driver.

“Come home for something proper to eat,” Edie said. “I’ve made soup. I thought it would be comforting.”

“Very mumsy.”

“I can do it,” Edie said grandly, ‘ I want to.”

They ate the soup in the kitchen at Riverside Terrace.

“Well?” Edie said. “What did you make of that?” Rachael imagined her asking the same question of her Theatre Studies group after a trip to the Theatre Royal in Newcastle. They would regard her with the same awkward silence which was Rachael’s response now, unwilling to commit themselves, preferring something more specific.

“I’m not sure.”

“Think!” Edie could never, Rachael thought, have been anything other than a teacher. “I mean what does it tell us?”

“Nothing,” Rachael said in frustration. “Nothing at all.”

“Of course it does. Doesn’t it seem odd that there was no one there from her past? No old school friend, no cousin.”

“There was the woman with the bags.”

“I’m not sure about her. If she was a genuine mourner why didn’t she make herself known?”

“Perhaps Bella wasn’t local then. The Gazette only goes to Kimmerston and the surrounding villages.”

“That tells us something then, doesn’t it?”

“Not much.” “In all those conversations she must have told you something about what she’d done before she turned up at the farm to look after Dougie’s mum.”

“I’m not sure.” On reflection all their conversations had been one-sided. Rachael had talked about her childhood, what it had been like to be brought up by such a right-on mother as Edie, her resentment at not knowing anything about her father. Bella had listened, commented, but seldom brought her own experience into the conversation.

“Doesn’t that strike you as odd?” Edie said. “I mean, doesn’t it suggest that she might have something to hide?”

“Of course not,” Rachael retorted. “We don’t all feel the need to discuss our childhood traumas with the woman behind us in the supermarket queue.”

Edie ignored the insult. “But most of us give away some information about our family, where we went to school, work… “

“I think she might have gone to agricultural college,” Rachael said, ‘to study horticulture. Or perhaps her parents had a market garden.

She knew about gardening but she didn’t enjoy it. She said she’d been put off when she was young. That’s why she never bothered with a vegetable garden at Black Law. I thought it was the wind or the frost, but she said it was a luxury to buy her veg from the supermarket.”

“It’s not much to go on.”

“I’m sorry. She valued her privacy. Perhaps that’s not something you’d understand.”