The Crow Trap Read Free Page A

to see Edie. Not for comfort though. Edie wasn’t that sort of mother.
    Chapter Three.
    Instead of using her key at the ground floor door she went down the steps and banged on the kitchen window. She didn’t want to appear suddenly in the kitchen from inside the house like a ghost or burglar.
    Edie wouldn’t be expecting her back.
    The door was opened, not by Edie, but by a middle-aged woman with dramatically dyed black hair, cut straight across her forehead in a Cleopatra style. She wore chunky gold earrings and a knitted tubular dress which reached almost to her ankles. The dress was scarlet, the same shade as her lipstick. There was also a child, a girl, denim-clad, bored and sulky. Rachael felt a stab of fellow feeling.
    The room was filled with cigarette smoke. It was very hot. The couple must have been invited to an early supper because the table showed the remains of a typically Edie meal. There were pasta bowls brought back from a holiday in Tuscany, scraps of French bread, an empty bottle of extremely cheap Romanian red. Edie was making coffee in a blue tin jug. She looked up casually. People were always banging on the kitchen window.
    “Darling,” she said. “Come in. And shut the door. It’s blowing a gale.”
    Rachael shut the door but remained standing. “I have to talk to you.”
    “Coffee?” Edie turned absent-mindedly. The kettle was still in her hand.
    “Mother!” It was the only way she could think of to claim Edie’s attention. She never called Edie that.
    Edie looked at her, frowned. “Is it urgent?”
    “Yes. Actually, yes it is.”
    With a competence, politeness and speed which astonished Rachael, Cleopatra and the daughter were dispatched. The coffee was never drunk.
    “So sorry you had to go,” Rachael heard Edie say at the main front door as if their departure had been entirely their own idea.
    When Edie returned to the kitchen Rachael had found another bottle of wine and was opening it. “I wish you wouldn’t let people smoke in here.”
    “I know, dear, but she was desperate. Her husband’s just run off with one of his students.”
    “And you discussed that here. In front of the daughter.”
    “Not directly.” She grasped for a word: “Only elipt-ically. He used to teach with me in the college. I appointed him. I feel a certain responsibility.” “Of course.” This was said with an irony which Edie perfectly recognized.
    She sat opposite Rachael at the scrubbed pine table and calmly accepted another glass of wine. Edie had recently retired but she had not let herself go. Despite the radical leanings which had so embarrassed Rachael in childhood she had always thought appearances mattered. Her short hair was well cut, her skin clear. She dressed well in an ageing hippy sort of way in long skirts, ethnic padded jackets. Rachael wondered if her mother had a lover at the moment. There had always been men when she was growing up but Edie had acted with discretion which bordered on the obsessive. Those men had never been welcome in the chaotic, crowded kitchen. It had been made quite plain to them that they would never encroach on Edie’s domestic life.
    Edie looked up at Rachael over her glass.
    “I hope,” she said carefully, ”re not here to go over old ground.”
    Meaning her father.
    “No.” “Then tell me,” Edie said very gently, ‘ you think I can help.”
    Rachael drank her wine in silence.
    “Is it boyfriend trouble?”
    “Don’t be stupid. I’m not fourteen. Anyway, do you think I’d talk to you about something like that?”
    “Well, yes. I hope you might.” Edie sounded regretful which made Rachael feel churlish, stupidly childish.
    “Bella died,” she said. “Last night. She committed suicide by hanging. I found her.”
    “Why didn’t you come back home before? Or phone? I’d have come out to you.” “I thought I could handle it.”
    “That’s not the point. I’m sure you can.”
    Rachael took a long time to answer.
    “No,” she said.