The Crow Trap

by Ann Cleeves

  The houses would be demolished and replaced by a structure more in keeping with the nature of the operation, a building with clean lines, made of glass and local stone. Rachael had seen an artist’s impression of the proposed block. It appeared low and inconspicuous, built into the hill. Through the large windows you could see sketches of women sitting at computer terminals. There were landscaped surroundings, a belt of newly planted trees. No pictures had been shown of the quarry itself, of the blasting and the lorries and the machines with claws and diggers. There were, though, details of the plan to renovate the mine chimney. According to the PR men, it would be a symbol of continuity.

  Already it appeared on the company logo.

  From the mine Rachael broke away from the track and took the direct climb to the top of Hope Crag.

  From there she could lock onto her moorland survey square. The land sloped gently in a series of plateaux to the horizon, which was softened by woodland around Holme Park House and the village of Langholme. The keeper had been burning heather in rotation to provide a supply of new green buds for the red grouse. There were strips and patches in different stages of growth. It was the habitat she most enjoyed working. She lay on her stomach looking down on it. There was a soft westerly breeze blowing into her face and all around her was the song of meadow pipit, skylark and curlew.

  She saw at once that it would be as difficult to define the survey area as she had anticipated but now she considered that only a challenge.

  There was a straight drainage ditch which would mark one boundary and a wall, collapsed in places, which would do as another. The rest she would have to manage with map and compass. Not many surveyors could achieve satisfactory accuracy by this method but she would.

  The knowledge gave her confidence. She got up quickly and began to walk down the crag, leaning back into the slope and kicking her heels into the heather to make better progress, towards a block of conifers.

  There was a path through the Forestry Commission plantation which would take her almost into the Black Law farmyard. It was possible that Anne Preece was still at Baikie’s working on the maps and Rachael wanted to set things straight between them. It wouldn’t do to let resentment simmer. Edie, of course, would have known exactly what to say. She always made too much of these differences, or not enough, but still she was the project leader and it was her responsibility to sort it out.

  She came down the slope at such a pace that at the bottom she had to stop for a moment to catch her breath before setting off across the damp area of junco us and cotton grass towards the trees. She crouched and stretched to ease the muscles in her legs, then turned back for a last look at the crag.

  Someone was there, standing just where Rachael had been lying on her stomach minutes before. It hardly seemed possible that she had not seen them approaching. She had been looking out over the fell so they must have followed her up the path from the lead mine, but quietly, not making their presence known. Rachael was looking into strong sunlight so the figure appeared only as a silhouette next to the outcrop, almost as another finger of rock. It stood very still, apparently staring directly down at Rachael. She was reminded suddenly of the man who had been on the hill on the evening of Bella’s suicide. The disturbing sensation of being watched returned.

  But she had the impression that this was a woman. The shape, blocked against the sun, was of a woman with short hair, or hair pulled away from her face, wearing a full skirt over boots. For one fanciful moment Rachael thought of Bella, who’d always preferred skirts to trousers and often wore them with Wellingtons around the farm. Rachael had slung her binoculars over her shoulder for the yomp down the hill.

  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.

  Chapter Five.

  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 orde
r, 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.

  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 sp
iteful 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.

  Chapter Six.

  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.