‘OK.’
‘Besides, it’s such an ideal time. All of the Oxley men are still here in Edendale, being interviewed for the affray outside the Wheatsheaf. They won’t be back in Withens for hours yet. We’ll never have a better opportunity to take a look round without being interrupted.’
‘Sounds good. But, Ben …’
‘Yeah?’
‘The least sign of anything interesting, and we pull out and organize a proper search by the specialists.’
‘Procedure,’ said Cooper.
‘It’s not a dirty word, you know.’
Now it was raining properly. It was bound to, since it was bank holiday weekend and the area was full of tourists. The morris dancers would be getting wet in Edendale. Their hankies would be going limp and their bells would be rusting up. But nothing would stop them dancing.
In Withens, the dark clouds lay right on top of the village, flattening it into the valley bottom and squeezing the moors closer together, so that the rain ran out of them on to the road and down into the gardens of the brick terraces. For once, it was the black brick that seemed to blend into the landscape, while the stone houses above glinted a little too brightly as they soaked up ‘-‘
the moisture.
‘Trafalgar Terrace is up the hill there, behind the trees,’ said Ben Cooper. ‘Waterloo Terrace is beyond that.’
‘You were right - two fields to cross.’
‘Maybe we should walk around this first field, though,’ said Cooper. ‘We should avoid the livestock.’
They’re only cows,’ said Fry. The do recognize the difference >
b
between bulls and cows, Ben. I’m not quite the ignorant city girl
you think I am.’ 5
‘Diane ‘
‘Bulls have bollocks and cows have tits. See? I know all the
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agricultural expressions. If I wanted to, I reckon I could convince people I was a farmer and get subsidies for not growing anything. Besides, I’m not wearing anything red.’
They’re colour blind,’ said Cooper.
‘All the better.’
‘May’s a bad time to be near cows, Diane. We had an incident of a woman being savaged by a cow only the other day.’
‘Come off it.’
‘People get this wrong. They think cows are docile and bulls are aggressive. Young bullocks are just mischievous, and older bulls are usually too lazy even to get up. But cows in May … if they have calves with them, they’ll do anything to protect them. And they’re a herd, so if you fall out with one, you fall out with the whole lot.’
To his surprise, Fry was actually listening to him. He’d had visions of her getting trampled before she was halfway across the field.
‘So what do we do?’
‘Walk around the outside. Avoid eye contact and walk past naturally. We’ll be fine then.’
‘OK.’
It worked, of course. All the cows wanted was to be left in peace in their field. Leave them alone, and they’d leave you alone. It was one of the laws of nature.
In the second field, Cooper stopped at the sound of wings fluttering against metal. He walked over to an object partly hidden in the wet grass near a wall.
‘What have you found?’ said Fry.
‘It’s a Larsen trap.’
‘A what?’
‘Some of the old farmers put them out to catch crows in the spring. You don’t see them so much these days. They’re frowned on a bit, on the grounds of cruelty to crows.’
Fry walked over to see what he’d found. ‘Well, it looks as though this farmer’s caught one,’ she said.
‘No, that’s the lure bird.’
The trap consisted of a cage with two compartments. One side was hinged open, and there were three hen’s eggs inside it. The other compartment contained an unhappy-looking crow, which stood among some bloody scraps of meat, splatters of its own droppings, and pools of water splashed from a small bowl. When it
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saw them, the bird panicked and flapped at the bars, and Cooper drew back a few steps.
‘I don’t understand/ said Fry.
‘This bird acts as a lure. What the farmer hopes is that a passing crow will be inquisitive and think this one has found a source of food. It comes down and lands on that convenient perch there on the baited side, with its eye on
