The Crow Trap (7 page)

Of course I want you there.”

Dougie had been prepared for bed. He wore pyjamas, striped like an old-fashioned prison uniform, with Rosemount Private Nursing Home stamped in red on the collar, a thin to welling dressing gown, brown tartan slippers. The slippers had been put on the wrong feet. He had his own room, pleasant enough, looking over the garden, though it was nothing compared with the view at Black Law. It was very hot. Dougie was perspiring. Rachael had pulled off her sweater as soon as she came into the building.

Outside in the corridor there was constant noise -the clatter of a wheelchair, staff voices shouting about baths and commodes and what had happened to Mrs. Price’s tablets, patients, confused and distressed.

When they arrived Dougie was staring at a portable television which stood on a mock pine formica chest of drawers. The sound was so low that Rachael could hardly hear it. Dougie seemed mesmerized by the fuzzy flashing pictures.

They think he’s daft, Rachael thought, and wondered angrily what Neville had told them. Yet when they went in it was clear that Dougie recognized her. The sister, who showed them into the room, was taken aback by the quick, lop-sided smile, the good hand patting the arm of the chair to indicate that Rachael should come closer.

“You’ve got some visitors, Mr. Furness,” she said shouting, as if he had deliberately misheard her, and

Rachael thought it was the first time she had spoken directly to him.

The visit had been worth it just for that.

Rachael squatted beside him, put her hand on his. “Oh, Dougie,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

The sister looked at her watch, muttered something to Edie about being in her office if she was needed, and went out.

It was a strange conversation, as intensely focused as one of Edie’s therapy sessions. Dougie communicated by nods, grunts, squeezes of the hand, yet they understood each other. Occasionally they were distracted by the skittering sound in the corridor of soft shoes on polished lino, a high-pitched squeal, the noise, Rachael thought, of rats in a barn, but soon they returned to the business in hand. It came down to this: Bella had killed herself and they couldn’t understand why.

“I want to find out,” Rachael said. “Do you mind? Perhaps you would prefer she was left in peace.”

Dougie made it clear he would prefer nothing of the sort.

“I’d like to look in the house.”

He turned his head away from her and stared back at the television. At first Rachael thought she had offended him, but he clasped her fingers even tighter. It was Edie who followed his gaze, went to the chest of drawers and returned with a bunch of keys.

“Are these the Black Law keys, Dougie?”

But Rachael had already recognized them. They had hung on a cup hook in the kitchen between Dougie’s Newcastle United mug and the giant yellow and green teacup from which Bella drank her coffee.

“I should tell Neville, shouldn’t I, that I’ll be going into the house?”

She looked at him, waiting for an answer but his concentration had gone. In the corridor there was another minor disturbance. A woman screamed in a high, thin voice: “Go away, don’t touch me. Your hands are wet. Your hands are wet!” There were running footsteps, soothing voices but Dougie seemed not to hear.

Rachael, still crouched on the floor, turned so she was speaking almost into his ear, a child whispering secrets, forcing him to pay attention.

“Tell me, Dougie, do you remember the day Bella died?” He continued to stare at the flickering images on the television but she thought he was remembering. What did he see? Bella in the house at Black Law bending over his bed? Bella dressing up to die?

“Did anyone come to Black Law that day? I expect you heard me. I drove through the yard just as it was getting dark. All the dogs started barking. But did anyone come before that?” He seemed lost in thought.

“Was anyone there before me, Dougie?”

She was aware of an effort of memory. He nodded.

“Inside the house?”

He nodded again.

“Did you see them? Do you know who it was? Or hear a voice you could recognize?”

Painfully he shook his head.

Chapter Nine.

Overnight the wind had dropped. There was frost in the valley bottoms and beneath the dry stone walls. The smoke from Baikie’s chimney rose straight into the sky.

Grace was in the kitchen making toast. She held the tiny grill pan close to the gas flame. Otherwise you could wait for hours. She was alone.

“Did your friend come?” Rachael asked. The smell of the toasting bread made her feel hungry. She’d left home deliberately, before Edie was up.

“Yesterday afternoon.”

“Stay the night?”

Grace shook her head, not just an answer to the question but a way of making it clear that no other information would be forthcoming. “How was the funeral?” she asked. She put the toast on a plate, spread it thinly with margarine, cut it in half and offered a piece to Rachael.

Rachael took it and added marmalade.

“Oh, you know.”

“I can’t remember ever having been to a funeral,” Grace said. Rachael thought it was an odd way to put it. It wasn’t a thing you’d forget.

Then the door opened and Anne came in looking very pink and healthy like a child bursting into the house demanding tea after playing out in the street with friends.

“I didn’t hear the car,” Rachael said.

“No, I got Jem to drop me at the end of the track. I thought it looked a nice morning for a walk.”

“I’ve not long arrived. I must have just missed you.”

Anne grinned and Rachael thought it wasn’t Jeremy who’d dropped her at the end of the track but whichever lover she’d spent the night with.

“Have you had breakfast?” Grace asked. She cut another slice from the loaf and put it under the grill. Rachael had never before seen her prepare food without prompting.

“No,” Anne said. “I didn’t seem to have time.” Anyone that smug, Rachael thought, deserved to be gossiped about. She waited until Anne and Grace were on the hill before going into the farmhouse. She didn’t want to explain what she was up to. They might have thought her morbid.

There were two doors into the house. The one Rachael had always used led straight from the yard into the kitchen. It was modern, hardwood and double-glazed with a double lock as standard. Dougie had bought the door when he had the kitchen renovated for Bella. It had been a surprise, a sort of wedding present, a new start anyway. In the old lady’s day the kitchen had been small, dark and draughty, leading into a leaking scullery with a twin tub washing machine and a wringer. Bella had grumbled mildly about the twin tub. It had been before Rachael’s time but she’d heard the story: “By then there were sheets to wash most days. Ivy couldn’t help herself. I had muscles like a weightlifter lugging them, soaking, into the spinner. Poor lamb. It’s not the way I’d want to end up.”

After the wedding Bella had gone away for a few days Rachael wondered now where she could have gone and came back to find the new kitchen.

Apparently she’d pointed out a photo in a magazine to Dougie, said what a picture it was and he’d copied it exactly. His mother had left him some shares and he’d blown the lot on it.

It was the washing machine which pleased Bella most though, as she said wryly to Rachael, it would have been more handy when the old lady was alive and she had bedding to do every day.

The kitchen was tidier than Rachael had ever seen it. Bella had obviously cleaned the floor just before she died. On the window sill there were plants which needed watering but she’d never bothered much about those. In the drawers and cupboards there was nothing to give a clue to her past.

Rachael moved on to the small parlour where Mrs. Furness had sat in the evenings before taking to her bed. Nothing much could have changed since then. There was an upright piano, small dark wood tables with crocheted runners, framed embroidered samplers, a standard lamp with a fringed shade. The photos were of Dougie with his first wife, Neville as a small boy. In her day Ivy Furness must have been a fit and active woman. Dougie’s first wife had died, quite suddenly, of a brain haemorrhage when the boy was two and Ivy had taken the family on. It occurred to Rachael that Neville must have regarded her almost as his mother. Perhaps he’d been closer to her than to

Dougie. It would be interesting to find out if he’d been more assiduous about visiting her than his father.

Dougie’s first wife had been a beauty; from her Neville had inherited the black hair, the brown skin, the intense eyes. Bella had spoken of her occasionally, without jealousy.

“She was only a girl when they met, a bit wild by all accounts. Look at her picture. You can see why he fell for her.”

She was a southerner, still at art school, visiting relatives in the area. He’d bumped into her on the hill. She’d been sketching the lead mine. The completed picture still hung in the living room given pride of place over the mantelpiece.

“Don’t you mind?” Rachael had once asked.

“Of course not. We both came with a history.” But her history was never discussed, and Ivy Furness’s parlour revealed none of its secrets, nor did the living room with its view of the hills, and the enormous painting of the mine, a constant reminder of Dougie’s first love.

There had been talk of turning Ivy’s parlour into a bedroom for Dougie when he first came back from the hospital, but, as Bella said, the bathroom was upstairs and she was hardly going to wash him at the kitchen sink. In the end social services had provided a st airlift so they could keep the bedroom they’d shared since they were married, probably even before that. Bella had never been a great one for convention.

Someone must have been into the room since the night Bella died to collect Dougie’s suit for the funeral. Perhaps Neville had come when they were out on the hill. Rachael hadn’t heard a car. But he had taken the clothes and gone. That was all. The room still smelled of disinfectant and of Bella’s perfume. Rachael searched it as meticulously as elsewhere, but without expectation of finding anything.

If Bella had wanted to keep secrets from Dougie this would be the last place she’d choose.

The room which they called Neville’s, the room where she’d slept off Dougie’s whisky, had been stripped of everything except a single bed and a wardrobe. Her place at Edie’s was still full of schoolgirl clutter. Even if she got round to buying a flat of her own she thought it would still be her room, with the curtains she’d chosen, her stencils covering the wall. This was impersonal. Nothing belonging to Neville had been left behind.

That left a third bedroom, which Rachael had never seen before. It was reached by two steps down from the landing, at the back of the house.

It was small, with a sloping roof and a big cupboard containing the hot water tank. There was a narrow divan, covered with a cream quilt, still slightly crumpled as if someone had been sitting on it. By the divan was a desk, of the kind you would once have found in a schoolroom with a lift-up lid and an inkwell. Even though the surface had been sanded and painted with red gloss the scratched indentations of graffiti were still visible.

Inside the desk was a wooden box, inlaid with marquetry and mother of pearl. Once perhaps Bella had hidden it more carefully, but after Dougie’s stroke there had been no need. The two steps from the landing meant he would never visit this room. Rachael took the box to the bed and opened the lid.

At first she was disappointed. It seemed to contain the details of quite a different person, Isabella Rose Noble. There was a birth certificate in that name, dated 16 September 1942 giving the place of birth as Kimmerston, Northumberland. Next came a certificate of education dated 1963. Isabella Rose Noble had attended a teacher training college in Newcastle and was qualified to teach primary children. Only when Rachael shook a faded newspaper cutting from a brown envelope did she connect Isabella Noble with Bella Furness. At first the cutting meant nothing to her. There was an article about a child swept away by a flooded river. The body was never found. But the article was cut off in mid-sentence so she turned the paper over and read the other side.

There was an obituary taken from a local paper, dated 1970. There were two columns of print and a photograph. The man looking out at her was dark and full-faced. His name was Alfred Noble. He had died at the age of seventy, so the photograph, of a florid middle-aged man, must have been taken many years before his death.

All these details Rachael took in later. What she thought first, when she looked at the cutting, was that it was a picture of Bella. The square face, the thick dark eyebrows were the same. If the hair had been longer and if Alfred Noble had been wearing the chunky gold earrings which Bella loved, the two would have been identical. Was Alfred Noble Bella’s father? If so, why had she said her maiden name was Davison?

Rachael went on to read the smaller print. Alfred Noble had died in tragic circumstances after a long illness. This was not a news report but an eulogy.

Councillor Noble had served the town of Kimmerston well for thirty years before giving up his duties. HI health had also dictated his retirement from his position as postmaster. The funeral had taken place at the Kimmerston Methodist Church where he had served as steward. He would be much missed. He was described in the obituary as a widower but there was no mention of surviving children. Surely there would have been if Bella was his daughter, but how else could she explain the coincidence of the birth certificate, with a date which tallied with Bella’s age, and the startling resemblance?