‘We’ll fly Arwen first,’ Nick said, reaching out and taking the hood off the bird to his right. Getting its vision back, the falcon flapped its wings and gave a little hop. The other birds seemed to sense something going on. A little collective shiver passed from one to the other. Both dogs had disappeared from view.
‘What are they looking for?’ I asked. ‘Rabbits?’
‘Peregrines won’t take prey from the ground,’ said Nick. ‘Some birds will, owls for instance, and buzzards, but peregrines have too much speed. If they hit the ground at over a hundred miles an hour they wouldn’t survive. They have to take their prey on the wing. Steady, sweetheart.’
Arwen wanted to be off. She was straining against the tether, pecking at Nick. Keeping a tight hold of the straps, he lifted her off and put her on his forearm. We walked on, Nick holding his arm at right angles like a medieval huntsman, and I felt a ridiculous sense of anticipation. If someone had told me two weeks ago I’d be out falconing!
Then everything happened at once. One of the dogs started barking and a mass of flapping grey feathers shot into the air. Then Arwen was soaring into the sky like a bullet, wings that had seemed so light and delicate on the perch pumping her upwards with incredible force.
‘She’s seen it,’ said Nick. ‘Keep your eye on her.’
I tried, but it was over so quickly. The partridge – I learned later that’s what it was – didn’t stand a chance. The peregrine saw it, accelerated, and a couple of seconds later the mid-air collision took place twenty feet above us. I thought I heard the captured bird screaming, or it could have been Arwen howling in triumph, then the two began to plummet. For a moment I thought something had gone wrong, then Arwen’s wings stretched out to slow her down. They landed and Nick picked up his pace to reach them.
The dogs beat us to it but stood waiting politely. Nick lowered his framework of birds to the ground, lifted Arwen off the dead partridge, and tethered her back on the frame. Then he pulled out a knife, cut the partridge’s head off and offered it to Arwen, who sat, alert and eager, on his gloved hand.
‘Are you squeamish?’ he asked, as she tore the head apart in seconds and tiny speckles of red began to stain the snow. Smelling blood, the other birds grumbled and pulled against their tethers.
‘I have my moments,’ I said.
We flew the birds one by one. When Nick’s had all had their turn and his game bag was filling up, he let me try. The trick was in keeping the bird calm until the moment for it to fly, then releasing it quickly and smoothly. Clearly there was a knack to it because my birds weren’t nearly as successful as Nick’s. By the time the last bird had flown, ribbons of pink and gold were strung across the sky and my legs, working extra hard because of the snow, were starting to ache. A sudden cry overhead made me look up to see three swans flying above us.
‘I think we’re done,’ Nick said. ‘If we follow the fence at this point, we can pick up a short cut.’
I was happy with that, so we made our way round the outskirts of a small copse. As we turned away from the sunset, the vista opened up for us again. About a mile away was a collection of large, low buildings.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Industrial estate,’ Nick replied. ‘Couple of miles outside Cambridge. We’ve walked quite a way.’
Between us and the estate was a long, narrow wood of beech trees. I could see a line of quivering willow trees too, telling me a river was close.
‘I think that’s where I had my buzzard encounter,’ I said. ‘And where your friend Jim Notley ordered me off his land, incidentally.’
Nick gave me a surprised look. ‘He never told me.’
‘I don’t think he recognized me. I was in running gear.’
‘That’s a footpath down there,’ Nick said. ‘He shouldn’t have ordered you off that.’
‘I wasn’t on the path,’ I admitted. ‘I’d gone into the woods to escape the blood-sucking feathered fiend.’
‘Ah, well, that explains it. Jim’s very protective about that copse. He has a lot of nesting pheasants in there.’
‘In January?’ I asked, not entirely sure when the pheasant breeding season was but thinking midwinter seemed a bit unlikely.
‘Maybe it was force of habit,’ Nick said. ‘The ground round here’s riddled with rabbit holes. Take care.’
‘There was something odd about those woods,’ I said. ‘There were effigies.’
Nick stopped walking. ‘There were what?’ he said.
‘Stuffed figures, hanging from trees. It was a bit freaky.’
He frowned at me. ‘Are you sure?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s possible they were something else entirely. A bit of sphagnum moss hanging from the trees and I just mistook them for human figures. And the dead animals strung up could have been, I don’t know, litter from the industrial units. Possibly balloons; maybe your friend Jim’s planning a party.’
‘Dead animals?’
I shrugged and he started walking again.
‘Jim’s a bit odd but I haven’t heard of anything like that before,’ he said. ‘Unless some kids have been hanging around. Maybe that’s why he was a bit jumpy with you.’
That certainly seemed reasonable but I wasn’t sure Jim was ever going to be a bosom friend. There’d been something unhinged about him.
‘What was that?’ I asked, stopping in my tracks and making Nick jump to one side to avoid walking into me. The sound had been low-pitched, metallic, almost mournful.
‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls,’ Nick said, stepping closer to me. The wind, gentle for such a cold day, blew in our faces.
‘There’s a church near here?’ I’d known it was a bell the second it had sounded up. It had just seemed so unlikely in the middle of the Cambridgeshire countryside.
‘That’s the foundry bell,’ said Nick.
‘Foundries don’t have bells.’
‘The whole estate is built on the site of an old Victorian bell foundry. Why do you think it’s called Bell Foundries Industrial Estate?’
‘I didn’t know it was.’ I’d assumed Bell was a person, that Nick Bell was probably the one Bryony was scared of. I’d never thought it would be an actual bell.
‘What you can hear is an ancient iron bell hanging from the wall of the old factory building,’ Nick said, taking my arm and steering me towards home. ‘You can only hear it when the wind’s in the right direction.’
Which it was now. As we headed for home I could hear the low, sonorous clanging, eerie, like the sound of a ghost ship about to materialize out of fog.
AT THREE O’CLOCK, when the sun was low in the sky, Evi and the dog that was already answering to Sniffy went outside. There were tracks in the snow from Sniffy’s earlier explorations. And two none-too-fragrant little presents from previous calls of nature. As Sniffy padded round, poking her nose under shrubs and squatting periodically to leave pools of yellow in the snow, Evi walked the length of where she judged the path would be.
At the bottom of the garden was a low brick wall with an iron gate that led to the river bank and a tiny landing stage. Tied to a post and covered in tarpaulin was a small canoe. Evi had plans, when she was feeling better, to take up canoeing. Her arms were as strong as anyone’s and there was no reason why she wouldn’t make a reasonably good canoeist.
If she ever felt better again.
She’d spent most of the night huddled under the duvet, waiting for painkillers she shouldn’t have taken to kick in or for the amitriptyline to knock her out. The dog had joined her on the bed and Evi hadn’t the heart to push her off. Sniffy’s presence soothed her somehow, even though it was the dog, more than anything, that was making Evi believe that Laura’s first instinct might have been right after all. That she was nuts.
