by Ann Cleeves
“Does it show?” He grinned. “No. Newcastle born and bred. But Jan, the wife, thought the country would be a better place to bring up the bairn so I put in for transfer. Best thing I ever did.”
Though now, here in the wilds, he didn’t seem so sure. She’d guessed he was married. It wasn’t only the ring. He had a well cared for, pampered look.
“Shouldn’t you be getting back to them?” she said. “They’ll be wondering where you are.”
“No, Jan’s taken the bairn to visit his grandma. They’ll not be back until after the weekend.”
She felt jealous of this woman she’d never met. He so obviously missed her. And it wasn’t only the freshly ironed shirts and the meals. It was the empty bed and no one to chat to when he got home after work.
“You don’t mind answering some questions about Mrs. Furness? Now, I mean. It must have been a shock but I’ll need a statement sometime.” “No,” she said. “I’d rather get it over, then I can get some sleep before the others get here. What do you want to know?”
“Everything you can tell me about her.” I wonder if you’d say that, she thought, if your wife was at home. But she talked to him anyway, because she wanted to tell someone about Bella and what good friends they were. It was like a fairy story, she said. Bella coming out to the farm to look after Dougie’s mother and falling in love with it all, with Dougie and Black Law and the hills.
They’d married and they really had lived happily ever after, even after Dougie’s stroke.
“Why’d she kill herself then?”
She hadn’t been sure he’d been listening. It was the question which had been lying at the back of her mind all evening. “I don’t know.”
“But the note was her writing?”
“Oh yes. And not just the handwriting. The way the words were put together. It was like Bella talking.”
“When did you last see her?”
“November last year.”
“Well, that’s it then. Anything can happen in four months.”
“I suppose it can.” Though she had not thought Bella would ever change. And Bella would realize that she’d not be able to leave it at that. She’d know Rachael would have questions, that she’d not be able to settle until she found out what lay behind it. So why hadn’t she left her more to go on?
“I don’t like to leave you on your own. Is there anyone you can go and stay with?”
So I can keep you company, she thought, on the drive to the road.
“I’ll wait until the others arrive, then I might go to my mother’s, in Kimmerston.” She said it to get rid of him so he would realize she had family.
Someone to look after her. Afterwards she thought she might go home for a few hours. She’d sort out Anne and Grace in the cottage then she’d go to see Edie. Not for comfort though. Edie wasn’t that sort of mother.
Chapter Three.
Instead of using her key at the ground floor door she went down the steps and banged on the kitchen window. She didn’t want to appear suddenly in the kitchen from inside the house like a ghost or burglar.
Edie wouldn’t be expecting her back.
The door was opened, not by Edie, but by a middle-aged woman with dramatically dyed black hair, cut straight across her forehead in a Cleopatra style. She wore chunky gold earrings and a knitted tubular dress which reached almost to her ankles. The dress was scarlet, the same shade as her lipstick. There was also a child, a girl, denim-clad, bored and sulky. Rachael felt a stab of fellow feeling.
The room was filled with cigarette smoke. It was very hot. The couple must have been invited to an early supper because the table showed the remains of a typically Edie meal. There were pasta bowls brought back from a holiday in Tuscany, scraps of French bread, an empty bottle of extremely cheap Romanian red. Edie was making coffee in a blue tin jug. She looked up casually. People were always banging on the kitchen window.
“Darling,” she said. “Come in. And shut the door. It’s blowing a gale.”
Rachael shut the door but remained standing. “I have to talk to you.”
“Coffee?” Edie turned absent-mindedly. The kettle was still in her hand.
“Mother!” It was the only way she could think of to claim Edie’s attention. She never called Edie that.
Edie looked at her, frowned. “Is it urgent?”
“Yes. Actually, yes it is.”
With a competence, politeness and speed which astonished Rachael, Cleopatra and the daughter were dispatched. The coffee was never drunk.
“So sorry you had to go,” Rachael heard Edie say at the main front door as if their departure had been entirely their own idea.
When Edie returned to the kitchen Rachael had found another bottle of wine and was opening it. “I wish you wouldn’t let people smoke in here.”
“I know, dear, but she was desperate. Her husband’s just run off with one of his students.”
“And you discussed that here. In front of the daughter.”
“Not directly.” She grasped for a word: “Only elipt-ically. He used to teach with me in the college. I appointed him. I feel a certain responsibility.” “Of course.” This was said with an irony which Edie perfectly recognized.
She sat opposite Rachael at the scrubbed pine table and calmly accepted another glass of wine. Edie had recently retired but she had not let herself go. Despite the radical leanings which had so embarrassed Rachael in childhood she had always thought appearances mattered. Her short hair was well cut, her skin clear. She dressed well in an ageing hippy sort of way in long skirts, ethnic padded jackets. Rachael wondered if her mother had a lover at the moment. There had always been men when she was growing up but Edie had acted with discretion which bordered on the obsessive. Those men had never been welcome in the chaotic, crowded kitchen. It had been made quite plain to them that they would never encroach on Edie’s domestic life.
Edie looked up at Rachael over her glass.
“I hope,” she said carefully, ”re not here to go over old ground.”
Meaning her father.
“No.” “Then tell me,” Edie said very gently, ‘ you think I can help.”
Rachael drank her wine in silence.
“Is it boyfriend trouble?”
“Don’t be stupid. I’m not fourteen. Anyway, do you think I’d talk to you about something like that?”
“Well, yes. I hope you might.” Edie sounded regretful which made Rachael feel churlish, stupidly childish.
“Bella died,” she said. “Last night. She committed suicide by hanging. I found her.”
“Why didn’t you come back home before? Or phone? I’d have come out to you.” “I thought I could handle it.”
“That’s not the point. I’m sure you can.”
Rachael took a long time to answer.
“No,” she said. “Not on my own. Not this time.”
“Ah.” Edie drained her wine. It left a stain on her lips and the wide front teeth which Rachael had inherited. “Do you know, I always felt jealous of Bella. A bit. It doesn’t mean I’m not sorry now. Of course not. But I resented the way you were so close, the two of you.”
“You never met her, did you?”
“That made it worse. I imagined … it was the way you talked about her. I thought … “
“That I wished she was my mum?”
“Something like that.” “No,” Rachael said. “But we were friends. Real, close friends.”
“If you want to talk about her I can listen all night.”
“God no.” Wasn’t it typical of Edie and her friends that talking was seen as all that was needed? Throughout her childhood this house had been full of talk. She’d thought it was like a soup of words, drowning her. Perhaps that was why she liked numbers best, counting things.
Numbers were precise, unambiguous.
“What then?”
“I need to know why she did it.”
“We are certain that she meant it? It couldn’t have been an accident?
Murder
even?”
Rachael shook her head. “The police came. And there was a note. It was her writing. And I explained to the policeman the words were put together as though she was speaking. Do you know what I mean?”
Edie nodded.
Of course, Rachael thought, you know all about words.
“She knew I was coming that night. If she had a problem she could have talked to me about it. Perhaps she thought I wouldn’t help.” “No, she wouldn’t have thought that.”
“I should have kept in touch over the winter. Then I’d have known. Do you realize I didn’t even phone her?”
“Did she phone you?”
“No.”
“You do know, don’t you, that guilt’s a common feature of bereavement?”
“Edie!”
Edie had taught English and Theatre Studies at the sixth form college, but had also been responsible for pastoral care. She’d attended courses on counselling. The regurgitated nuggets of psychology always irritated Rachael.
“I know,” Edie said unabashed. “Psycho babble. But it doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”
“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.