Ann Cleeves - The Crow Trap

Edie of course saw through him at once. Rachael made the mistake of taking him to meet her one Sunday. It was May, a humid sultry day and they had lunch in the garden. It should have been a relaxed affair but Edie took against Peter from the start. She glared into her wine glass as they made conversation across her. The more hostile she appeared the more Peter tried to charm her. Even Rachael could tell that he was coming over as flash and insincere. Later she expected a lecture about her choice in men but Edie was uncharacteristically restrained.

“A bit showy for my taste,” she said in a stage whisper as she followed Rachael into the kitchen with a tray of dirty plates. “Never trust the showy ones.”

But it was the show which captivated Rachael and which would be her downfall. She loved the way Peter disappeared from Baikie’s with talk of a meeting at Trust Headquarters, only to return at dusk with flowers and champagne. She loved dancing with him on the lawn to the music from Constance’s old wind-up gramophone. No one had ever made such a fuss of her before.

She couldn’t discuss this extravagance with Edie, who would disapprove of these gestures of chauvinism, even if she hadn’t taken such a dislike to him. So when she needed to share her happiness Rachael went to Black Law farm for a gossip with Bella. Bella encouraged her belief in love at first sight hadn’t it happened to her and Dougie? and followed their romance with sympathy and interest.

“What are your plans then?” she would ask. “You will see him once the contract’s over?”

“We don’t talk about it much,” Rachael answered. “We, you know, live for the minute.”

She didn’t go into precise details about what living for the minute involved, though Bella would have understood. It seemed in poor taste to talk about skinny-dipping in the tarn by moonlight, making love in the heather, when Dougie couldn’t walk without help. And she did have plans, secret plans which she wouldn’t admit to anyone, not even Bella.

These might not have included a wedding with a white frock, though suspect images of that sort did float occasionally round the edge of her subconscious, but they were about her and Peter setting up home together and having children. Edie would be horrified of course, but what Rachael really wanted was to be a proper mother in a proper family.

The first betrayal, the worst one, came two months after Peter had left the Wildlife Trust to set up his own consultancy. Rachael had been in on the scheme from the start and having completed her MSc she started working for him. She had her own desk and computer terminal in the small office which was all he could afford. She acted as receptionist, secretary and main scientist.

Now, there were no bottles of champagne and few nights of passion. She still dreamed. She understood that money was tight and that he had been under considerable stress. It couldn’t have been easy to give up a steady job to go it alone. It was enough that she could be there in the crowded, chaotic office to support, that occasionally he would brush his lips over her hair and say, “You do know, don’t you, that I wouldn’t be able to manage all this without you?”

Then she saw an article by him in New Scientist. It described a new methodology for counting upland birds. It was the methodology which she had devised, and indeed she was acknowledged in very small print at the end of the paper, along with half a dozen others, including Anne Preece. But he took the credit for it. He claimed it as his own. In a comment, welcoming the new system, the magazine’s editor wrote: “It is clear that the Kemp methodology, with its accuracy, clarity and simplicity, will become a benchmark for Upland surveys. In the future it should be the recommended system for all such work.”

Because of the article Peter was suddenly very much in demand. Now work flooded into the office and he was asked to organize seminars for other agencies. Often he asked Rachael to prepare his notes and the diagrams for the overhead projector. She did as he asked without making a fuss, though she could no longer bear for him to touch her.

She often wondered why she didn’t confront him with this betrayal. Why, indeed, did she continue to work for him, supporting the business through its expansion to a new, smart office? Of course there was a practical reason. It would be hard to find such a suitable job, paying a living wage, in the north of England. But she knew that wasn’t really important. It was a matter of pride. If she resigned from Kemp Associates she would have to admit to others and to herself that Peter had made a fool of her. She would have to accept the possibility that his only reason for making love to her was to steal her ideas, to concede that Edie had been right. It was better to let the world think that Peter had devised the method for counting upland birds. She was sure that by now he believed it himself.

The second betrayal came in the form of a large square envelope, which she found one morning propped on her desk. It contained an invitation to Peter’s wedding. There seemed to be no spiteful intent in informing her of his marriage in this way. He presumed that she accepted the affair at Baikie’s as a pleasant thing, a piece of fun. After all there had been no intimacy between them for months. She learnt from colleagues that the francee was called Amelia. It was Anne Preece, flitting into the office one day in the search for work, who provided more detail.

“Amelia?” she said. “Oh, she’s quite debby in a rather down-market way. Not aristocratic, not really interesting. A potential extra, you know, in the crowd scenes in Hello! magazine. She’d have been quite pretty if her parents had made her wear a brace.” No one at work thought Rachael had more than a passing interest in her boss’s engagement, so at last, when she felt the need to confide her misery, she made an excuse to spend a night at Baikie’s. She invited Bella to supper and snuffled her way through a box of tissues and two bottles of wine. She woke with a hangover and the belief that she was free of the influence of Peter Kemp.

It was only the crow, hopping pathetically in the trap, which brought him back to mind.

Rachael had planned in detail what she would say to Anne when she got back to Baikie’s after her walk on the moor. “Look, I’m sorry for being such a bossy cow. You must understand. It’s my first time as project leader and I’m nervous about it. I don’t want any cock-ups.”

But when she arrived at the cottage it was empty. The kitchen was tidy. The plates had been washed and dried. Grace and Anne had left details of where they would be on their hill and their estimated time of return, which was more than Rachael had done. In her irritation at finding the house in a state she’d stormed off without leaving her route information, though it was a rule which she had insisted none of them should ever break. The white sheets of paper, covered with scribbled grid references and times set squarely side by side on the table in the living room, seemed like an accusation.

Anne returned at precisely the time she’d stated. When Rachael tried to apologize for her earlier irritation Anne brushed it aside.

“Don’t be daft; she said. “There’s no need to apologize. We should be able to take it. We’re adults, aren’t we? Not a bunch of kids.”

This remark, which Rachael at first took as a gesture of conciliation, in the end seemed another criticism. Didn’t it imply that Rachael had done just that? Treated them like children.

Her inability to find the right tone in her dealings with Anne and Grace, the feeling that she either took too much control or lost control altogether, dominated her thoughts in the next few days. It was impossible to take a consistent line. The women were so different.