Snatch Crop Read online

  Ian snapped something at the doctor. I could only make out the word ‘. . . private’. The doctor swept us into a small office. Ms Anderton paused for breath.

  ‘If there’s one thing we need it’s total confidentiality,’ Ian said. ‘If reporters come sniffing round—’

  ‘Which they will,’ the doctor said gloomily.

  ‘—telling them that he’s unidentified will only make them sit up and take notice. Make something up. He’s Allan McKay, say, from Inverness. You don’t have his address here but his next of kin have been informed. You’ll pass it on?’

  The doctor nodded and made a note.

  Both men returned their attention to Elaine Anderton. She must have guessed that Ian was a policeman but she was past caring. By now, she had found her second wind and a little more coherence. ‘I want to see him,’ she told the doctor. ‘I want to see that he’s all right.’

  The doctor had had more than a little experience of breaking bad news. He sat down behind the desk, indicated the stacking chairs that were lined along the opposite wall and waited. His power of suggestion was stronger than mine. We sat.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s not possible,’ he said.

  ‘For one thing,’ said Ian, ‘we’re too late. He’s already on the way to Edinburgh by ambulance.’

  Ms Anderton tried to jump to her feet. Ian prevented her, by patting her reassuringly on the shoulder and then leaning his weight on her. He and the doctor had both adopted avuncular manners towards her; they also seemed both to prefer that anyone in an agitated state should remain firmly seated.

  ‘Even if you caught up with him,’ said the doctor gently, ‘you couldn’t see him. He’ll be in surgery for hours. Are you his wife?’ he asked her.

  ‘His fiancée,’ she said defiantly.

  The doctor apparently knew that the injured man had a wife but he managed not to raise his eyebrows. ‘I’m afraid his condition is critical,’ he said.

  ‘The crash was a bad one,’ Ian said. ‘The car rolled over more than once.’

  I had decided to say nothing but I changed my mind. ‘Surely he must be conscious, if he was trying to get a message to me . . .’

  ‘A few seconds of lucidity,’ said the doctor, ‘before the intercranial haemorrhage took over.’ He paused, weighing his words. ‘It’s early days,’ he said at last, ‘but, to be honest, his chances are far from good. Apart from the skull fracture, he’s broken more bones than I’d care to list and we suspect a rupture of the spleen. There’s also spinal damage. If he recovers consciousness, it certainly won’t be before late tomorrow.’

  ‘If? Not when? If?’ Elaine Anderton’s voice was running away up the scale.

  The doctor nodded sadly. I braced myself, ready to help quell an outburst of hysteria, but she took the other escape route. Her eyes rolled up and she fell sideways across my knees. I caught her before she rolled to the floor. There was no weight to her.

  The doctor came round the desk quickly, felt her pulse and pulled up an eyelid. ‘Shock,’ he said. ‘Understandable. We’ll keep her here overnight under sedation.’

  ‘Private room?’ Ian suggested.

  ‘Quite so.’

  ‘I’ll fix up somewhere for her to go after that, where she needn’t be alone. I’ll be in touch tomorrow.’

  Ms Anderton was removed, feet first, on a trolley by a nurse and an orderly, with the doctor in attendance. She looked rather as I have always pictured the Lady of Shalott, pathetic and yet glamorous. Similarly placed, I would have been an inert lump of meat.

  ‘The poor kid!’ Ian said. ‘I’ll take you home. Bernard Thrower will be Edinburgh’s business now.’

  The rain had set in. Usually, Ian would have let me wait in the doorway while he fetched the car. But he was deep in thought and rather than break into it I followed him across an acre of wet tarmac. We were both wet by the time we were in the car, but he sat behind the wheel with the key still in his hand.

  ‘I wish she’d postponed the vapours for a little longer,’ he said. ‘I wanted to ask her . . .’

  ‘About Mr Thrower’s papers?’ I suggested.

  ‘We already have those. Her bungalow was searched, quite illegally. No, I wanted her to repeat every word he’s said to her.’

  ‘Edinburgh can ask him for themselves,’ I said.

  ‘I doubt it. Before you arrived, the doc was saying that he’d be surprised if Thrower even makes it to Edinburgh.’

  ‘Oh dear!’ I said inadequately.

  ‘Yes, it’s bad. We’ve got to find that girl before whoever’s got her realises that they don’t need her any more. And still not a damned thing to go on. The solution of every case depends on getting the breaks and so far they’re not coming our way.’

  ‘Something will turn up,’ I said.

  ‘That’s for sure. Probably the girl’s toes, if the luck doesn’t turn first.’

  Chapter Five

  Nearly another week slipped away. Mr Thrower, I was given to understand, was still alive, still unconscious and still of doubtful prognosis. The doctors’ view, relayed by Ian, was that, if he survived at all, it might be as a human vegetable.

  Whatever was happening in the case, I was no longer part of it. Ian had resumed his role of discreet and close-mouthed officer but, from his prolonged absences and the constant trickle of messages which reached him at home, I could guess that intensive searches were continuing for Delia, for witnesses to her kidnapping and for any signs of the suspected kidnappers or their associates.

  With Ian determined not to bring his work home, it seemed that my peripheral part in the case had been due to coincidence. Mrs Thrower’s work at the factory had brought her husband there and, finding me sympathetic, he had suggested a message which could bring him out of hiding. When no such message had been passed he had decided that I was not in cahoots with the police and had mentioned me to Elaine Anderton – Miss Anderton, Ian told me – as a possible message-passer and letter-drop.

  Delia’s predicament was haunting me, leaping into my mind like a demon out of a trap-door at unexpected moments. But from now on, I thought, I would know little more than I could read in the papers and infer from Ian’s movements. And that would be little enough. Somehow, all mention of the accident to Mr Thrower had been suppressed and the kidnapping was yesterday’s news.

  The fates had other ideas. I must have inherited some of Dad’s knack for finding trouble. With him, the knack was mostly a combination of curiosity with antennae ever alert for anything suspicious. He had passed me the gene of curiosity, but the rest seems to be blind chance. There must have been clues to Delia’s whereabouts scattered around the countryside, contact traces and fallen tears, but nobody had managed to find them. The tiny clue that came to the factory could so easily have passed through unrecognised. Perhaps something else would have turned up to give the police a lead. One of the many officers might have picked up a whisper about strangers behaving oddly. Or Delia might never have been heard of again. The door-to-door enquiries and the searches which were still being carried out over the moors by helicopter were, as it turned out, in all the wrong places.

  We were busy at the factory. Pheasants were full-grown and the commercial shoots were holding their bigger days. (Later in the season, as birds became thinner on the ground, bags would reduce.) And the shoots which had been cancelled on the day of the search had been rescheduled. Pheasants were coming in at such a rate that I was beginning to wonder whether we hadn’t bitten off more than we could chew – or more than even our new markets could absorb.

  When, in mid-morning, the whirr of the plucking machine died away, I was out of the office in two jumps. A machinery breakdown we needed like an outbreak of gapeworm. Plucking by hand would be expensive and impossibly slow. The cold-room would be overflowing before help could reach us from the makers. I had been demanding a standby machine for weeks but Sir Peter had been either too busy or too thrifty to sanction it.

  I dashed out into the brightly lit prepara
tion-room, ready to do something constructive like tearing my hair and running round in little circles, but it seemed that Madge, who had been operating the noisy machine, had stopped it to hold a discussion. If this was a convening of the shop stewards, the same reaction would have been appropriate.

  On the stainless steel table beside the plucking machine a dozen naked pheasants were laid out. On a butcher’s block Mrs Beattie, a tireless worker but much too dignified to have a Christian name, had been removing heads, wings and legs, gutting the birds into polythene sacks and laying them out for weighing and sorting by size, all with the effortless speed of a compulsive knitter. She and Madge were stooped over a plucked but otherwise complete pheasant.

  I looked where Mrs Beattie’s finger pointed. Some birds arrived at the factory with the crop already burst by shot or by impact with the ground. Of the remainder, about one bird in three or four, depending on the operator’s handling, came out of the plucking machine with the crop newly opened, spilling grain or rape-seed. Some grain was spilling over the table. I had another moment of panic, thinking that they had spotted something toxic which would result in the whole batch being dumped; but Mrs Beattie was singling out some tiny grains from among the others. I looked more closely.

  Two glass beads of an unusual lavender or lilac colour winked under the fluorescent lights.

  ‘Didn’t the paper say that Mrs Thrower’s wee girl was wearing her bracelet?’ Mrs Beattie asked.

  I looked at Madge. ‘Tell Samantha—’ She removed her ear protectors and I began again. ‘Tell Samantha to phone. Get a message to my husband that somebody should come down here straight away.’

  She nodded and hurried into the office.

  ‘Was this the last bird to come out of the machine?’ I asked Mrs Beattie.

  Another nod. The ladies soon got used to communicating by signals around the noisy machine. ‘It was Melanesian,’ she said. She meant melanistic.

  The other girls had gathered round, pleased with the excitement and the break in routine. ‘It looks just the colour of the bracelet Delia wore,’ another girl said.

  I was more cautious. ‘The colour would look different under the fluorescent lights.’

  ‘It’s under these lights that we’re used to seeing it,’ said Mrs Beattie.

  I stood still and used my eyes. Allowing for the different lighting, the colour of the beads looked very like those I had seen on Delia’s wrist. There could have been thousands of similar baubles in he neighbourhood but the likelihood of a bracelet or necklace being broken in the woods was more remote. Mrs Thrower had said something about the bracelet having been brought from Turkey; but it might easily have reached Turkey from Birmingham.

  One of the pheasant’s wings still bore a dark red tag, printed with two digits that could have represented the current year. The remaining feathers looked unusually dark. The spurs were small. I looked in the bag that caught most of the feathers. There was a layer of very dark feathers on top of the contents.

  Madge tapped my elbow. ‘He’s on his way,’ she said. She stooped to look again at the beads. ‘A wink of light caught my eye or it’d’ve gone in the bin. I thought to myself, that looks awfu’ like the beads Miss Delia showed me that her Dad gave her. You think it’s the same?’

  ‘They look very like it,’ I said. Between the cold-room door and the plucking machine, another steel table was heaped with pheasants in full feather. ‘Did these all come in together?’ I asked her.

  ‘They came yesterday,’ she said. ‘Whether they’re all off the same estate I couldno’ say.’

  ‘The crops will have to be opened, but we’d better not disturb anything until the police are here.’ I looked again at the grain surrounding the two bright beads. ‘Would you say that this was barley?’

  Mrs Beattie had been brought up on a farm. ‘Definitely barley,’ she said. ‘And look.’ I looked. What I had taken to be small shot was some other seed.

  ‘Rape-seed?’ I suggested.

  ‘Turnip,’ she said. ‘They’re o’er sma’ for rape. Somebody’s neips has bolted to seed.’

  ‘Well done,’ I said. She looked gratified. ‘Now, you girls had better go and help with cleaning and packaging. Tell the others we’ve had a machinery breakdown.’

  ‘They’ll run out in an hour. What’ll they dae then?’

  ‘I’ll let them know.’

  Tyres yelped to a halt in the yard outside. The girls wanted to linger and share in the excitement but I shooed them through the door into the other unit.

  Ian came in on the double, but scowling. ‘This had better be good,’ he said.

  I hid my excitement rather than risk raising false hopes. ‘You can be the judge,’ I told him. I showed him the beads. ‘They look exactly like the beads in the bracelet Delia wears,’ I said. ‘I’ve never seen others quite that colour. Mr Thrower brought it from Turkey. It may be just a cruel coincidence, but she wore the bracelet around here almost every day and the girls are unanimous. Follow it up or not, just as you like. How are you off for other leads?’

  He shook his head impatiently. ‘Where did the bird come from?’

  ‘I don’t know but I think I can find out. Meantime, I’ll want the prep-room working again as soon as possible.’

  We snapped at each other for a minute or two. Policemen always think that everything for a hundred yards around a scrap of possible evidence can be left intact for weeks. Others of us know better. We settled on a compromise. Madge would open the crops of the remaining pheasants while somebody came to remove any evidence that might be needed for scientific study. Ian went out to his car to use the radio while I sent Samantha out of the office on some improbable errand.

  I waited until Ian joined me. ‘Shall I do this by phone?’ I asked.

  ‘Tell me what you’re doing first.’

  ‘Only two keepers brought pheasants yesterday, but both of them brought more than they’d have shot in a day. Sometimes they save them up for a day or two, damn them! And sometimes they pick up each other’s birds to save time and expense. But I can probably pin down where that bird came from.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘The bird was a melanistic cock. That’s a sort of deformity of coloration, very dark – a genetic throwback. You don’t come across them very often. Keepers tend to remember them.’

  ‘If you can narrow it down without starting a lot of gossip, go ahead,’ he said. ‘What would beads be doing in a pheasant’s crop anyway?’

  ‘They pick up grit to help grind up the other stuff,’ I explained. ‘Especially hard grain. I suppose a small glass bead would function very well. If the stringing broke while she was being manhandled . . .’ I stopped. For a moment my voice refused to work.

  ‘I understand,’ Ian said. ‘Get on with it.’

  I looked up numbers. One of the keepers was near his home. His wife fetched him from the shed. He said that he hadn’t seen a melanistic bird all year. He wanted to know why I was asking and I told him that I was damned if I was paying for a bird that had been shot from all directions and at close range and was carrying more shot than its own body-weight. He sounded amused.

  The other keeper was away from home but was expected back in about an hour. He had collected birds the day before, his wife said, from two neighbouring keepers. She couldn’t tell me whether any of them had been melanistic.

  To save time, I phoned those keepers. Neither had had a melanistic cock in the bag since late October.

  ‘That’s your starting-point,’ I said. ‘Mr Taylor’s the head keeper at Boyes Castle. He’ll be home by the time you can get there. He’s a nice old chap and not a gossip. You want to know where a melanistic cock, this year’s bird, was shot. It had been feeding on barley stubble and also turnipseed and it had a dark red wing-tag with this year’s date on it.’

  Ian was looking unhappy. ‘What’s the significance of the wing-tag?’ he asked.

  I tried not to look impatient. Ian had been coming on well as a clay pigeon shot an
d I was inclined to forget that his new-found knowledge of the countryside and field sports was still largely superficial. ‘Some keepers just put birds into the release pens and count how many are bagged in the season. Anything around a fifty per cent return is counted as pretty good. More conscientious keepers want to know how many of their own birds they’re getting as opposed to inward migrants and wild stock, so they’ll tag their birds with a different colour each year. The really good keepers, and I’d expect Mr Taylor to be among them, use different tags for different release pens so that they can tell, after the birds have been free for three months or more, which pen each one came from. That way, they can measure the success of each release area, how far the birds have wandered from it and so whether any pens need to be moved.’

  ‘But they can wander a hell of a long way, can’t they? I mean, they’re birds.’

  ‘They’re birds,’ I admitted, ‘but they’re not birds of passage. They’re pedestrians, not aviators. If the cover’s good and they have feed and water, they don’t wander very far. Especially the cocks.’

  Ian was still struggling to understand. ‘I thought they’d wander off in search of the hens.’

  ‘Other way round,’ I told him. I nearly added that they were just like people but I decided to leave him with the illusion that man was still the hunter.

  He scratched his neck, looking even less happy. ‘I’ll have to do this myself,’ he said at last. ‘I can’t have the local bobby tramping around asking questions. But you’d better come with me. You know the language. Can you get away? Delia’s life . . .’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘Samantha can look after the office and Madge Foullis can oversee the factory. As soon as the prep-room’s working again.’

  He glared at me but he knew that I had him by what Dad would have called the short and curlies. ‘If you’re right about the beads, and if they were dropped where she was being taken, and if she’s still there and if a dozen other things, we may be messing about within sight of whoever’s holding her. I don’t think they’ll know me by sight but I don’t want to start anyone thinking by circling around in a shiny car with two aerials. We need something that looks like part of the local scene. Any chance of borrowing your uncle’s old Land Rover?’