Man Trap by Gwen Moffat

Author:Gwen Moffat
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AudioGo Limited
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Two days after the theft of the Purdey Ruth and Charlie lingered at Cougar, airing the house. They had gone there for the eggs and Ruth remarked that the hens should be out of their pen, foraging in the yard in the spring sunshine. Charlie pointed out that, with no one at Cougar, the fox would be cheeky enough to take the birds in broad daylight.

‘You ought to be living here,’ she told him, regarding the open windows, thinking of the house as animate, responding to the soft air.

‘You’d be alone at Camlet.’

She turned and opened the garden gate to emerge on the track. This wasn’t surfaced but river cobbles had been put down as a kind of natural hard core and in places the soil was still damp from the thaw. She looked up the track. ‘Archy can’t be cutting pests yet,’ she murmured. There were old peat banks beyond a place called Larach but pests weren’t cut until the summer.

‘No one goes to Larach in winter,’ Charlie said, coming to stand beside her and consider the odd tyre imprint between stones.

‘I thought Larach meant “ruin”.’

‘It does. There’s an Iron Age settlement, and the farm would have been named for that. It’s a lovely place: ancient oak woods and pastures: an oasis in the wilderness. You’ll have to see it in springtime.’

‘It’s spring now, Charlie. Let’s go; we could do with a good walk.’

It was a glorious morning. There would be frosts to come, even more snow, but today larks rose, pealing, into still blue air, curlews bubbled away across the burn, lapwings tumbled, and the track was bordered by yellow bands of celandines. Occasionally they came on the marks of tyres which hadn’t been made by a Land Rover nor by Archy’s farm bike.

‘Tourists.’ Ruth was dismissive. ‘Or bird watchers.’ She was, if not enjoying herself, lost in this fresh world that smelled of life and growing things. Charlie, without betraying his watchfulness, was aware of her interest in her surroundings and thought that, at least for a while, she had forgotten the terrible winter.

They rounded a heathery knoll and, a mile ahead, there was a splash of green below brown slopes and a couple of buildings, from this distance appearing occupied but with no animals in the fields. Blair would put cattle and sheep up here as soon as there was enough grass. Away to the left there were glimpses of a metalled road that looped down across moorland and through the park to the castle.

As they approached it was obvious that there was no glass in the windows of the house, and a number of slates were missing revealing bare rafters. The barn roof was of corrugated iron, one sheet partially lifted, cater-cornered to the sky. ‘I bet that makes a hell of a row in a gale,’ Ruth said, and shivered.

Crows observed them from a chimney stack, flapping away in silence as they came nearer. There was a distinct smell of fox. ‘You can

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