I first met Alice at a conference on motivation in crime fiction held at the University of Verona, which marked one of my few forays from southern England, since when we have enjoyed a regular and stimulating correspondence. At first we would write to each other about books and birds, two shared passions. We maintained a week-long exchange of emails in which we talked about collective nouns for different types of birds. We would also discuss Virginia and Donald. I would lightly tease Alice about what I perceived as her tendency always to defer to them. I knew, for instance, that it was always Virginia and Donald who made the farmhouse booking, after which they would invite Alice and John to join them. Virginia and Donald would accept payment of half the rent, but they would handle all dealings with the owners, and either they gave the impression — or allowed Alice and John to form the understanding — that they were somehow vaguely in control.
Last year, in the early spring, Alice emailed me to ask if Diana and I wished to join them for a week’s holiday in the west of Ireland.
“In the farmhouse? Is there room for six?”
Alice explained that she and John, having heard nothing from Virginia and Donald, had taken the initiative and emailed them to say they were thinking of going to the farmhouse again and wanted to check to see what Virginia and Donald’s plans were before asking anyone else to join them instead.
“We got a noncommittal answer,” Alice wrote. “I inferred that they didn’t really want to go this year, but didn’t want to give offence by saying so straight out.”
After which, Alice had let a few weeks go by before asking Diana and me if we wanted to join them.
“You’d love it,” she wrote to me. “Oystercatchers, rock pipits, even reed buntings. And there’s always a murder of crows in the field behind the farmhouse.”
“How many crows make a murder?” I asked.
We decided on three; two would be pushing it.
I said I would talk to Diana and we would look at our diaries.
A week later, Alice telephoned. Virginia and Donald had been in touch to propose the same arrangement as usual.
“Oh,” I said.
“Oh no, you were going to say you would join us, weren’t you?”
“Well, I know I hadn’t got back to you, but you know how it is,” I said.
“Oh damn! I would much rather we could go with you and Diana.”
“We’ll go another year,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”
I didn’t hear from Alice for a while and assumed she was busy, which I certainly was, having agreed to be an external for a neighbouring institution. Plus I was trying to complete a couple of papers for academic journals to bolster my department’s RAE submission.
These two papers finally off my desk and with days of unending rain denting any hopes of a decent summer, I emailed Alice to ask how the week in Ireland had gone. She replied with a brief report on bird species spotted. The reed buntings had materialized, also gannets, great black-backed gulls and lots and lots of crows.
“A murder?” I asked.
“Oh yes.”
It continued to rain and although Diana and I ticked the days of August off the calendar, we never really felt that summer had arrived before the leaves started to change colour and the return to university unequivocally announced the arrival of autumn. The new term and the next were busier than ever and when Alice emailed in the spring to ask if we would like to join them for a week in the farmhouse, I didn’t even have time to enter into banter about their needing to check first with Virginia and Donald.
The farmhouse is situated on a peninsula. You have to drive through the town — a single street lined with shops and pubs with hand-painted wooden signs — then turn left on to the stone bridge. Once over the river, you head left again. There are fewer houses and the hedgerows are alight with a fiery combination of purple and red fuchsias and bright orange crocosmia lucifer.
As you approach the end of the peninsula, the road turns a sharp left in front of a shallow bay and after a hundred yards you have to stop to open a gate. Now on private land, you may take pleasure in leaving your safety-belt unfastened. The way is rutted; grass grows in a line down the middle of the path. Cows amble in the fields alongside. Like clockwork soldiers, jackdaws march.
In the farmyard, hens will scatter. A marmalade cat may be lying on a bale of silage enjoying the low sunlight. Gravel will crunch beneath your tyres and your handbrake will sound a little like the ratcheting cry of a magpie in the otherwise still air of the late afternoon.
They appeared on the doorstep, Alice implausibly attractive for an academic with her long golden hair, hazel eyes and plump red lips, while John’s wide-eyed grin hovered somewhere between boyish enthusiasm and the honest astonishment of a man who still can’t quite believe his luck.
We got out of the car, joints creaking after the long drive from Dún Laoghaire. I stretched theatrically, but necessarily; Diana approached the open arms of Alice and fell into her embrace. I shook hands with John, who was as hearty as ever.
A third person had appeared between Alice and John. Blonde, sun-blushed from working outdoors, she was introduced by Alice as Marie, the owner.
“Ah, it’s grand to meet you, so,” Marie said, surprising and unsettling us with sudden warmth and hugs.
We all moved back inside where Alice resumed food preparation. She was in the middle of peeling vegetables. John put the kettle on for a cup of tea. Personally I would have killed for a glass of Guinness, but four mugs had been lined up on the work surface. Granted they looked as if they were china, but still.
As he removed the spent tea bags from the pot, John turned to Marie.
“So you put these on the flowerbeds?” he said to her.
“Around the hydrangeas, yes. They work a treat.”
I helped Alice, gathering the potato peelings.
“What about these, Marie?” I asked. “You must have a compost heap somewhere?”
“Just put them in the back field,” she said. “The cat’ll like them.”
I looked at her and she beamed at me. I turned to Diana, frowning, then looked back at Marie.
“Really?” I said.
“Oh yes, the cat’ll like them.”
Neither Diana nor I had ever owned a cat, but I was pretty sure cats didn’t eat potato peelings.
Marie eventually left and we opened a bottle of wine. The food was good, the company excellent. Night fell softly around the farmhouse almost without our noticing.
I awoke to the cawing of crows in the back field. Diana was sleeping quietly. I eased my body out of the unfamiliar bed, grabbed my jeans and a T-shirt and walked softly out of the room.
As I brushed my teeth, I wondered if Alice and John, who now had the much better bedroom upstairs, had previously been obliged to use the one in which Diana and I had slept. It was a strangely inhospitable room, chilly despite the season. The tiled floor was cold underfoot. The convex mattress precluded a decent night’s sleep.
Finding the kitchen empty, I wandered outside. The potato peelings still lay in a little pile in the back field where I had thrown them the night before. Obviously the cat was not hungry.
Three or four crows picked at the topsoil in the middle of the field, among them a solitary rook. At this distance, I couldn’t see the rook’s white snout and identified it by its shaggy silhouette and awkward-looking gait in relation to its sleeker cousins. The birds were behaving against type since it is the rook that is sociable, while the territoriality of crows normally keeps their numbers down.
In the distance, the summit of Knocknadobar was still wreathed in low grey cloud. I imagined huge ravens tumbling acrobatically out of sight, their playful nature belied by their grim demeanour.