It wouldn’t have done for an ambitious young detective to see her father in court in contravention of the Wildlife and Countryside Act so she never liked him going into the hills on his own. He swore he had given up collecting but she’d never believed a word he said. Addicts always lied. And even if it was true on his own account, Connie Baikie had always been able to twist him round her little finger. She shared his compulsion. She might be too old and sick to get into mischief now but Hector, Vera’s father, was devoted and would have done anything for the old woman.
The champagne had been his idea. “A treat for the old girl,” he had said. Vera had thought he knew Connie was dying and especially wanted to keep her sweet because he had an eye on her collection. His own was extensive enough. It was kept in locked mahogany cases, each egg held safely in a nest of cotton wool in the spare room, hidden inside an ugly mahogany wardrobe. Vera was supposed not to know about this secret, though most nights he’d shut himself into the room like a dirty old man with a hoard of porn.
Connie’s collection he had leered at and salivated over openly since Vera was a child. Even after the Wildlife Act it had been kept in full view. Occasionally Connie saw Vera looking at the display cabinets.
“They’re quite legal,” she’d say, coughing and panting to get out the words, defying Vera to contradict her. “Collected before the Act was passed.”
Vera, though, had seen new trays added and would have investigated the origins of the collection if it hadn’t been for the Hector connection.
Better not to know.
So they had been in Baikie’s, drinking champagne, silently pondering over the distribution of Connie’s collection after death when there had been an intrusion, a small drama which had perked up the old girl no end. According to Hector the incident had probably kept her going for several extra weeks.
A woman had run into the garden and banged on the French windows. This wasn’t unusual in itself. Walkers occasionally violated Connie’s privacy, asking for water, directions, even to use the lavatory.
Sometimes Connie was gracious, usually she sent them away with a flea in their ear. But this woman was frantic. She banged on the door, hammering with her fist so Vera was afraid she’d break the glass and cut herself.
It was spring. There had been deep snow that year, recently melted, so the burn was very full and fast flowing. Vera could hear the noise of the flood water even above the woman’s hysterical words as she opened the door.
From her position on the sofa Connie couldn’t quite see into the garden and, afraid of missing out on the excitement, ordered Vera to bring the visitor into the room. Stricken, bored, she smelled entertainment. The woman was in her early thirties and seemed unsuitably kit ted out for a walk in the hills. She wore make-up, leggings, white shoes with a heel. Her words tumbled out in a senseless flow.
“What is the matter, my dear?” Connie wheezed, oozing concern. “This lady’s a police officer. I’m sure she’ll be able to help.”
At that the woman took Vera by the arm and dragged her outside to join the search for her baby. That was what the scene was about a lost child. They had driven out from Kimmerston to see the little lambs.
The woman whose name was Bev thought they were really cute and Gary, the new man in her life, had suggested making a day of it. They’d parked on the track just before the gate into the Black Law farmyard and had a picnic. There was a cold wind so they’d stayed in the car where the sun was lovely. They’d let Lee out to play. What harm could he come to, out here in the country? It wasn’t like the town with perverts and madmen lurking behind every lamp-post. Was it?
They must have fallen asleep, Bev said. Vera, noting the tousled appearance, thought this was a euphemism for something more energetic.
Then the next time they looked, Lee had disappeared.
Vera walked back with Bev to the car, reassuring her all the time that by then the two-year-old would surely have turned up again. But at the car there was no sign of him. Gary seemed a pleasant lad, genuinely distraught. He was very young. In the street he could have passed for Lee’s older brother rather than a potential stepfather.
“I’ve shouted myself hoarse,” he said. “And hit the horn. I don’t know what else to do.”
Vera left them there, went back to Black Law and got Dougie to phone for a search party. She and Dougie walked the hill until help arrived.
When she returned to Baikie’s Connie insisted on having everything described to her. The boy, the boyfriend, the mother’s tears. She and Hector seemed to have reached an understanding in Vera’s absence, because a few days later the collection of raptors’ eggs were delivered to the house in Kimmerston. They joined the stock of trays in the spare-room wardrobe. The day after her father died Vera burnt them all, without opening the cases to look, on a huge pyre in the garden, along with his notebooks.
There was no happy ending to the story of the missing toddler. Indeed there was no ending at all because the boy was never found and no body was ever recovered. There was a distressing and bizarre postscript.
A gamekeeper, apparently with an axe to grind, wrote to the local paper suggesting that Lee might have been carried off by a goshawk and fed to its young. Goshawks were vicious and dangerous and should be culled, he said. Woolly-minded conservationists should let keepers get on with their jobs.
The letter was so crazy that Vera suspected Connie might be behind it.
It was the sort of joke she would have loved and she could have carried it out with Hector’s help. Beverly latched onto the explanation, however, and fuelled speculation by remembering suddenly that a large powerful bird had been hovering overhead while Lee was playing. The national press took up the story and had a field day. The case became the English equivalent of the Australian dingo story. Beverly made enough money from photos and interviews to buy Gary a new car and take him on holiday to Cyprus.
Vera thought the little boy must have wandered off towards the burn while the adults were having it away in the car, and had been swept away by the flood water. It was the only sensible explanation. Now, drinking champagne on a sultry afternoon in midsummer, she thought it was quite a coincidence. Two deaths -because the boy must surely have died at almost the same spot so many years apart.
She thought Rachael might be entertained by the story of the goshawk and the gamekeeper but never got a chance to tell it, because Joe Ashworth came out of the house with a serious look on his face and told them about the second murder. Beating her story, she had to admit, into a cocked hat.
Chapter Fifty-Three.
In the car Vera was on the radio shrieking like a madwoman, swearing, trying to get some fix on what was going on. No one was available to talk to her. No one who knew. It wasn’t supposed to have happened like this. She’d hoped the killer would come back. She couldn’t see any other way forward. But to Baikie’s. To her own territory. Not in Langholme.
She veered off the road from Langholme into the Avenue and saw Anne Preece, sitting on the grass bank by the side of the lane, a grey blanket around her shoulders, a mug clasped in both her hands. It was raining and Anne’s hair was lank and straight. She stared ahead of her. Vera thought she looked like a vagrant after the arrival of the soup run.