Crow Trap

by Ann Cleeves

‘Weren’t you ever tempted to use it yourself?’

  He blinked up at Edie, hurt. ‘Of course not. I hoped one day she’d get in touch.’

  ‘Her husband’s disabled. He needs constant nursing care.’

  ‘So perhaps I could help with that.’ He considered the idea, seemed pleased. ‘I should have made more effort to persuade Bella to see me but I was very young. The whole business with Father had been horrible. Not just the way he died – I told you I could understand that. But all the publicity that followed. I felt hounded. Everywhere I went people were talking. I suppose I turned into a bit of a recluse. Horses were less complicated.

  ‘Then I married and Louise, my wife, thought it would be foolish to get in touch with Bella. I’d told her about the case but she couldn’t really understand what led up to it. Her attitude was – why get mixed up in it all now when people have forgotten about it. Bella could find me soon enough if she wanted to.’

  ‘And she definitely didn’t try to contact you recently?’

  ‘No. I wish she had.’

  ‘If she had tried to contact you but got through to your wife instead, would Louise have passed on the message?’

  ‘Of course.’ But despite the reply he seemed uncertain. ‘What are these questions about?’

  ‘Bella committed suicide, Mr Noble. We think she was troubled. No one at Black Law knew about the manslaughter charge. She was living under an assumed name when she met Dougie Furness. It occurred to us that someone might have discovered her secret, threatened her with exposure.’

  ‘And that’s why she killed herself?’

  ‘We think it’s possible.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that to her.’

  ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t. But can you think of anyone from that time who has suddenly appeared in the area again. A friend of Bella’s. Someone who might recognize her.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘You’ve not told Bella’s story to anyone?’

  ‘Actually, I don’t often think of her now.’ He looked at them over thick glasses, demanding their understanding. ‘Isn’t that a terrible thing to say?’

  ‘What about your wife? Could she have mentioned it to one of her friends?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s really the sort of thing they discuss at the Conservative Ladies’ coffee mornings.’

  ‘If you remember anything which might help would you mind giving me a ring?’ Edie said. ‘It’s my home number. I’m not often there but there’s an answering machine.’ She lowered her voice to a stage whisper. ‘You see, Rachael found the body. It was a terrible shock. I really think that only finding out what led up to the suicide will help her come to terms with it.’

  Good God, Edie, Rachael thought. You were doing pretty well until then.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  That evening Edie stayed in Kimmerston. There was a meeting of an educational pressure group to which she belonged and of course she felt she was indispensable. Rachael thought anyway that the isolation of Baikie’s had been getting her down. She thrived on constant phone calls, friends dropping in to weep on her shoulder or to drag her into Newcastle for a fix of culture. Anne had sometimes been up for a discussion about a play or a film, but her contribution often stopped after a discussion of the leading male’s anatomy.

  In the kitchen at Riverside Terrace Edie had thrown together a meal and tried to persuade her to stay too. Rachael refused – she’d brought her own car specially so she could get back and she didn’t want to leave Anne on her own.

  ‘Well, you will take care, darling, won’t you?’ Rachael took no notice of this. Edie’s mind was elsewhere. She was already planning her speech. And she’d never been much concerned for Rachael’s physical safety. While other parents stressed out about safe deliverance from parties Edie had been partying herself, assuming rightly that Rachael would have the sense to make her own way home. Edie had been bothered about more difficult things – relationships, anxieties, how Rachael felt.

  Now though, standing at the top of the steps to see Rachael off, Edie repeated her warning. ‘I mean it. Don’t stop for anything and keep all the car doors locked. And when you get into the cottage make sure everything’s bolted there too.’

  So suddenly Rachael was acutely aware of a danger she had never considered before. If even Edie was worried then she should take special care. Because of this jitteriness she stopped for petrol on the main road although she still had a quarter of a tank, enough to get her to Baikie’s and back several times over. When she tried to start the engine again nothing happened. She’d had a dodgy starter motor for months but hadn’t had the time or the money to get it fixed. Usually all it took was pressure on the bonnet to tilt the car to unstick it but this time, though she and the woman from the petrol station bounced and rocked it, nothing happened. And of course the AA took hours to get out to her, although she played the card of being a woman on her own.

  While she was waiting she phoned Black Law and told Joe Ashworth she’d be late. They weren’t to worry. And if Edie phoned they should explain what had happened.

  ‘I was just about to go home,’ he said. ‘There’s still someone here to keep a look out for Mrs Preece. And the inspector’s about somewhere. But if you like I’ll hang on so I can come down the lane with you.’

  She was tempted to agree. Then she thought of his wife, waiting for him. She’d have prepared a meal for him. Perhaps she’d even kept the baby up so Joe could give him a bath. And she remembered her first meeting with Joe Ashworth on the night Bella died. He’d been amazed by the work she did, astonished that a woman could survive on her own in the hills. She could hardly ask for an escort back after putting him right about that.

  ‘Nah,’ she said. ‘Of course not. Besides, I don’t know how long I’ll be.’

  It was midsummer in Northumberland and still light at ten o’clock as she sat outside the garage drinking cans of coke and waiting. By the time the car was fixed and she’d driven through the new tubular steel gate onto the hill it was midnight and black. When she got out of the car to open the gate she left the engine running and even then she fumbled with the catch in her haste to pull the gate open, because she was so worried that the car would stall.

  The battery must have been low because the headlamps didn’t seem to give out much light. At first she tried to go as quickly as she could but she had to slow down because she was hitting the bank and catching her exhaust on the biggest of the ruts.

  A sheep ambled into the track in front of her and she braked sharply and sat, petrified for a moment, staring into its bemused amiable face before realizing what she was looking at.

  This is crazy, she thought. Don’t panic. Relax. Think of something else.

  So she tried to concentrate on what she and Edie had been doing that day. It wasn’t too late for her to have riding lessons, was it? Just because it wasn’t the sort of thing a right-on mother encouraged her child to do. And she thought of Charles Noble, who’d loved animals too when he was a boy, so much that he’d wanted to become a vet. Yet he’d been forced instead to watch the live cattle and sheep herded from the trucks after market and be turned into meat. His father’s death had saved him from that. It had given him a chance to buy the stables. Charles Noble had much more of a motive for killing his father than Bella had.

  She was so excited by this new idea, so thrilled as she pictured dazzling Edie with it, that when she first saw the headlights coming out of apparently open countryside directly towards the passenger door of her car, she wasn’t frightened. She just thought, ‘I wonder who else can be out at this time of night?’

  This only lasted for a second. Then she got her brain into gear and began to work out what was happening. The car was coming towards her down the forest track, the track she had taken by mistake on her first drive to Black Law that season. She knew that the track dwindled into a footpath so the car must have been parked there. It surely couldn’t be a walker who’d left a vehicle there while he spent a day in the
hills. Not at this time of night. Had someone been waiting, sitting in the car, watching for her headlights through the trees? Or had they expected to have the place to themselves and been more surprised by her approach than she was by theirs?

  She reached the junction before the other vehicle, then looked in her mirror to see which way it would turn. If it was being driven by country kids on an illicit joyriding trip in their parents four-wheel drive or lovers wanting romance under the moonlight, it would turn back now towards the main road and the town. But it turned the other way and began to follow her.

  All right then, she told herself. There’s still no need to panic. It must be one of the police officers. Out on surveillance perhaps. Or Joe Ashworth’s sent someone to keep an eye out for me. Deliberately she tried to slow down. She was nearly at Black Law. She was approaching the ford. If she drove at this speed into the water she’d flood the engine, the car would stop and she’d look a fool. But if anything the car behind came faster. The driver had turned up the headlamps to full beam and when she looked into the mirror she was blinded. She couldn’t see the passenger or any details of the car.

  She was almost at the ford when it hit her. Her neck jerked backwards and for a moment she lost control of her steering. Instinctively she stuck her foot on the accelerator to pull away from it. The car jumped forward down the bank, hitting the water at an acute angle, bonnet down like a dive. Water sprayed the windscreen so she could see nothing. The engine hissed and steamed and then it stalled. She turned the key but nothing happened. She heard the burn eddying around her and in the distance the purr of the other car at idle.

  She craned her head to look behind, expecting all the time to feel the crash of another impact. She could see nothing but the hard white light of the headlamps. She turned the ignition again but the engine was quite dead.

  Into her mind ridiculously, came the image of the steward on a flight she’d once taken to the States. He had stood at the front of the plane, demonstrating, with elaborate pantomime, the brace position. She put her feet firmly on the floor of the car, where water was already seeping, and bent forward with her arms protecting her head. Behind her suddenly she heard the roar of the other car’s engine. As powerful as a jet.

  Nothing happened.

  The engine noise increased but instead of releasing its energy to shoot down at her the car screeched backwards. At this point the track was wide. There was a place where vehicles could turn if the ford was too deep to cross. The car backed into that and screamed away. Rachael listened to it disappearing into the distance. Then everything was quiet except for the sound of water lapping around the wheel arches. Still sitting with her arms around her head she began to tremble.

  She sat for twenty minutes before she accepted that she would have to walk back to the cottage. She turned the key over and over again but the car wouldn’t go. By then her feet were soaking and she was cold. There were three options. She could wait until morning when Joe Ashworth or one of his cronies would come along. She could hope that Vera Stanhope would still be awake and would send out a search party. Or she could take the risk of walking. She knew it would be a risk. The car had driven away down the lane but it could have parked again in the forest track and the driver could have returned on foot.

  What prompted her to action in the end was an urgent desire for a pee. No way was she going to sit there all night and wet her knickers. She unlocked the driver’s door and got out, having to push against the flow of water. There was a thin sickle moon which gave a little light. She looked once back up the track but she could see no shadow and she heard no footsteps. She didn’t want the inspector to see her in such a state. But she couldn’t make the last few yards to the cottage. She couldn’t face going past the open barn where she’d found Bella. She banged on the farmhouse kitchen door and when it wasn’t immediately opened she pushed it and almost fell inside.

  Vera Stanhope was sitting in the rocking chair where Bella had often sat. There was a beer can on the table beside her. She was reading a pile of papers. She wore spectacles, which Rachael had never seen before, attached to a chain round her neck. Besides the pen which she held in her fingers like a cigarette, a pencil had been tucked behind one ear.

  Why doesn’t she ever go home, Rachael thought. Isn’t she happy there?

  Then she began to cry. Vera got to her feet, took a fleecy jacket which had been folded over the back of the kitchen chair, and put it carefully around Rachael’s shoulders.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  When Rachael got up the next morning Vera had already turned up at Baikie’s. She stood in the kitchen with a piece of toast in one hand and a mug of Anne’s filter coffee in the other. Even coming down the stairs Rachael could hear her eating.

  So Vera had spent another night at Black Law. Another night working. What drove her? Ambition again. A fear of failure. Or perhaps, like Rachael, she didn’t have much to go home to. A husband or lover had never been mentioned and it was hard to imagine the inspector in domestic comfort. An evening curled up on the sofa watching telly wouldn’t have fitted in with the image at all.

  ‘We didn’t catch them,’ Vera said. ‘I thought you’d want to know.’

  She’d left the kitchen door open and the room was flooded with sunlight.

  ‘Nice day,’ Rachael said. ‘I should have got up early. I could have got my survey finished.’

  ‘Plenty of time for that surely.’

  ‘There’s still Grace’s stuff to check.’

  ‘All the same. No rush.’

  She doesn’t want us to leave, Rachael thought. She wants us here. The crows in the trap. She wants it even more than she did before. Last night the decoy worked. Besides, if we went, there’d be no excuse for her to stay. She’d have to go home too.

  ‘I thought we might get them,’ Vera went on. ‘There was an outside chance they’d still be in the area.’

  ‘Not they,’ Rachael said. ‘There was only one person in the car.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t know why. An assumption perhaps. No, when he drove off there was a shape in silhouette. Only the driver.’

  ‘Man or woman?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell.’

  ‘Not by the size?’

  ‘No. It was all too quick. A blurred shape. That was all.’

  ‘There was a patrol car on the A1,’ Vera said. ‘It searched the lanes around Langholme, but there was no one driving like a maniac. No one at all except a lad on a motorbike and a local woman on her way home after visiting her mother. Which means he didn’t panic. He had the sense to lie low somewhere until the morning.’

  Rachael poured herself coffee from the Pyrex jug. It was still hot. ‘Where’s Anne?’

  ‘Upstairs getting ready to go out in the field.’

  ‘I’d better be quick then.’

  ‘Like I said, there’s no rush, is there?’

  ‘I don’t want to be here any longer than I have to.’

  ‘No,’ Vera said. ‘Last night would have put the wind up anyone.’ It was said in a matter of fact way but it made Rachael defensive.

  ‘Look, I’m really sorry I was such a fool last night.

  If I’d left my car as soon as the other vehicle drove off you might have caught it at the other end of the track.’

  ‘I doubt it. Not if it was driving as fast as you say.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Have you remembered anything else overnight?’

  ‘Nothing. It was a powerful saloon. That was all I could tell.’

  ‘Colour?’

  ‘White. Pale anyway. Not metallic’ She paused and added bitterly, ‘Pathetic, isn’t it? That was probably the person who killed Grace. If I’d made more effort, got the registration number, you’d have been able to trace him.’

  ‘Can’t be helped,’ Vera said breezily. ‘We might be able to trace him anyway.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I’m going to make some more toast. Fancy
some?’ She cut two thick slices of bread, put them under the grill and lit the gas. The matches were damp and it took some time to get a flame. Rachael, watching, thought it added to the performance. Vera wanted her audience on the edge of its seat.

  ‘Go on,’ she said, playing along.

  ‘Well, it’s always been a mystery how our chappie got onto the hill. At first we thought he walked from Langholme, but that’s miles and we’ve talked to everyone who lives in the place. No one remembers a strange car parked that day. He couldn’t have driven all the way down the track because Mrs Preece was here and she didn’t see anyone. But if he’d parked down that forest path no one would be able to see the car from here, from the farmhouse or even from the main track. As soon as he drove down that dip he’d be hidden by trees. It’s all conifers there and planted really close together.’ Vera was getting more excited. ‘We had a team searching the hill of course but we didn’t deploy them that far into the forest. A mistake. My mistake. I’ve looked at the map again and the path goes on through the trees and comes out near the mine workings.’

  ‘Close to the crow trap,’ Rachael said. ‘I know it.’

  ‘I’ve had Joe Ashworth up there sniffing about.’ The inspector bared sepia teeth in a malicious grin. ‘He’s not a happy bunny. I called him back here at first light.’

  ‘That wasn’t very kind.’

  ‘Don’t give me that. He had all evening on the nest. I could have called him in last night but I waited. Compassion itself, that’s me. And I let him back to the farm for breakfast. He’s back in the forest now though, waiting for the forensic team.’

  ‘Has he found anything?’

  ‘Enough to put a spring into an old detective’s step. Last night certainly wasn’t the first time the car had been along there. The path’s sandy. There are some nice tyre tracks. And what looks like traces of paint where the car turned.’

  ‘What colour’s the paint?’

  ‘White. Why?’

  ‘I went along there by mistake the night I found Bella’s body. I didn’t attempt to turn but I made a hash of reversing. Paint from my car could be all over the place. My car’s white.’