Ann Cleeves: The Crow Trap

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.

She was unsettled again when she came to the crow trap. It was built on a piece of dryer ground close to the forestry plantation, close enough for her to smell the spruce. She knew keepers hated crows even Bella had wanted rid of them but she thought this was a particularly horrid form of control, not for the birds which were killed but for the one which played decoy.

The trap was a large wire mesh cage with a funnel in the top. Inside a live, tame crow fluttered provocatively, inviting in another to defend its territory. Once in through the funnel there was no way out.

Presumably they had to find some form of coexistence until the keeper came along to put the intruder out of its misery.

The keeper moved the trap at regular intervals. Crows were territorial creatures and wouldn’t fly far, even for a fight. The last time she had seen the cage it had been on the edge of the moor near the lead mine. She had been with Peter and he had made one of his outrageous gallant jokes. Then, in her naivety, she had been flattered by them.

They had seen two birds in the trap and he had said: “Look, they’re just like us. You’ve caught me and now there’s no escape.”

She had smiled, but even then, even though she had wanted to believe him, she had known it was the other way round.

Rachael was a postgraduate student at Durham University when she first met Peter Kemp. She took her first degree in Cambridge, almost as far away from Edie as she could manage, then she moved back to the north, not to be close to her mother but because the uplands had become her passion. She started by studying black grouse then transferred her interest to upland wading birds like curlew and snipe. When she met Peter she was devising a system for counting them accurately. She used Baikie’s Cottage as her base. Bella had already become a friend.

It was a windy day in April. She had come into Kimmerston at the request of Bob Hewlett, English Nature Conservation Officer, who saw her project as a way of obtaining useful data on the cheap. She had come across Bob before and didn’t like him much. He was a middle-aged man who dressed in tweeds. He drove a Land Rover with a couple of black Labradors in the back, looking very much the country landowner.

Rachael thought he was too close to local farmers, too desperate to be accepted by them, to do his job properly. He lived in Langholme and she’d seen him, drinking in the pub, all back-slapping chums together.

However, she knew better than to offend him she might want to work for the government’s conservation agency one day and when he invited her to lunch at the White Hart to discuss her project she accepted graciously.

“I’ve invited Peter Kemp to join us later,” Bob said suddenly as the food arrived. “He’s doing the same sort of stuff as you for the Wildlife Trust. You might be able to help each other out.”

It was the first time she’d heard Peter’s name though Bob assumed she knew who he was talking about.

The White Hart was a solid, stone-built hotel on Kimmerston’s wide main street. Once it had been the only place to eat in the town. Now there was a tandoori restaurant, a pizzeria and a Chinese take away and the White Hart had grown shabby. On Friday nights the public bar was a haunt for underage drinkers. Often it became rowdy, with petty skirmishes and visits by the police. During the rest of the week there was an air of genteel decay. The elderly waitresses, in their black and white uniforms, had few people to serve, even on market day, when for once the restaurant was full. The food was proudly traditional, in that the vegetables were overcooked and a brown glutinous gravy was offered with everything. When Rachael admitted to being a vegetarian there was something of a crisis. At last a leathery cheese omelette appeared.

As he mentioned Peter Kemp, Bob beamed at her across the table. His tone was that of a bucolic uncle, rather too familiar for her taste.

Despite the Land Rover parked outside he had a couple of Scotches while they were waiting to order, and since then a pint to wash down the meal. Rachael decided that Peter Kemp must be new to the Wildlife Trust. She knew most of the team. She was certain that she would dislike him; she needed no help with her project. Edie would have dealt sharply with Bob’s patronizing attitude the insinuating smile, the shepherding hand on the small of her back but Rachael always found it hard to be assertive without being rude.

She first saw Peter hovering in the doorway of the dining room. He was half hidden by a dark oak dresser which held smudged glass cruet sets and portion-controlled sachets of tartare sauce. She saw an arthritic waitress approach him to tell him that he was too late for lunch. He shook his head and gave her a lovely smile before pointing in their direction. Rachael could tell that the old lady would remember the smile for the rest of the day. He looked very young a sixth former let out from school for the afternoon, let out, almost certainly, from a good public school. As he walked towards them he smiled with the charming diffidence which was his hallmark, but she could sense the confidence which comes with an expensive education.

He was physically fit. She could sense that too. Even crossing the floral carpet of the dining room he had a long loping stride. He arrived at the table and reached out a hand to greet Bob formally. They exchanged a few words and then he turned to her. She had to half rise in her seat to take his hand and felt awkward, at a disadvantage.

“Of course I know your name from the Bird Report,” he said. “And from colleagues. You know, of course, that you’ve an impressive reputation.”

His voice was earnest, the schoolboy again, trying to please. She knew she was being worked on, but since the smile to the waitress, she’d found it impossible to resist him.

Even as she submitted to the flattery she realized that Peter wanted something from her. He said he’d like to visit her study area and compare the methods she’d devised for her survey with his own. By the time Bob Hewlett had drunk his second pint and she and Peter had shared a pot of coffee she had invited him to Baikie’s for a couple of days to watch her work. When she left the hotel she felt she was more unsteady on her feet than Bob, who was certainly not quite sober and drove off waving with the Labradors barking madly in the back.

That spring Peter spent more than a couple of days at Baikie’s. In the end he was there more often than he was in the office, and he stayed most nights. His excuse was that the Wildlife Trust intended to buy an upland reserve. It probably wouldn’t be in this part of the county but he needed to establish a baseline of moorland species in order to select a good area to target. She knew this was an excuse he could use her data once the project was over and she was delighted.

Her excuse for being taken in by him was her inexperience. When she was at university she had an affair with an older man, a lecturer of material science. It was doomed to failure. Even Rachael, despising as she did Edie’s psychobabble, could tell that it was not a lover for which she was searching but a father, and Euan had been unsatisfactory on both counts. She had never before had a relationship with a man of her own age, had never even gone in much for friends of either sex, so the passion for Peter had the intensity of an adolescent crush.