“We’ve been hired to do the survey and the report.”
“You stay all the way out here on your own?”
“Only tonight. My colleagues arrive tomorrow.” She looked out of the window at the lightening sky. “Today.”
“That’ll be Peter Kemp.”
“No. Peter doesn’t do much casework now. Anne Preece is a botanist.
Grace Fullweli’s a mammal expert.”
“Three lasses?”
“Three women.” “Oh aye.” He paused. “And you have to go out in the hills. Counting things?”
“Something like that. There’s a recognized methodology.”
“Isn’t it dangerous?”
“For women you mean?”
“Well, for anyone.”
“We leave a record of our route and the time we expect to be back at base. If there’s a problem the others can organize a search.”
“I’d not want to be out there without a radio.” He shuddered as if he felt suddenly cold. “I’d not want to be out there at all.”
She saw that he was prolonging the conversation so he didn’t have to set off up the track alone in the dark.
“You’re not a country boy,” she said.
“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.”