The Crow Trap by Ann Cleeves

she asked, thinking it was probably the advice page in his wife’s magazine that he’d been reading. He wasn’t wearing a ring but she thought he was married. He had the look.
    He paused and she was expecting him to lie but he said: “Yes, to Barbara. She doesn’t get out much.”
    “What a strange thing to say!” So strange that she pressed him to elaborate but he refused.
    “I’m married,” she said at last, stretching extravagantly. “And I get out all the time.”
    For some reason the remark seemed to embarrass him. He didn’t answer and stretched over to fill her glass. She’d drunk most of the bottle already. He’d offered to drive.
    “Are you local?” he asked. He was very polite as if they’d just met.
    “I mean, were you born near here?”
    “Quite near.”
    She hated going into her background. She’d always considered that her parents were rather horrible little people. Her father had been headmaster of a boys’ prep school. Until she was old enough to go to school herself she was brought up in that atmosphere of petty tyranny and ritual, of competitive games and fake tradition. Her mother lorded it over the other wives and her father lorded it over them all.
    “Where did you go to school then? The grammar, I suppose.” She was amused that this business of education seemed to matter so much to him.
    She rather despised people with formal qualifications but it seemed to be his way of defining them.
    “Lord, no! I got sent away to a ghastly heap on the North York moors.
    I didn’t learn a thing.”
    She always described her years at the ghastly heap in this way but she knew it wasn’t quite true. There was a woman who taught Biology, Miss. Masterman, who had seemed as lonely and isolated as any of the girls.
    She was young, straight out of college, rather prickly. A Scot who would have been more at home in an inner city secondary modern than this gothic pile. Even then Anne had wondered what she was doing there. It was hard to imagine her drinking afternoon tea in the panelled Mistresses’ common room with the stuffy spinsters who made up most of the staff. And she certainly seemed to prefer the company of a small set of older girls to that of her colleagues. She arranged tramps on the moors, and away from the school she seemed to relax. She carried with her a sketchbook full of pencil drawings. The lines were fine, the pictures full of detail. She sprayed them with a fixative which smelled of pear drops to prevent smudging.
    Occasionally, Miss. Masterman led them on fungus forays. Away from the school she encouraged the girls to call her Maggie but Anne always thought of her as Miss. Masterman. They’d carry flat wicker baskets and listen with delicious horror as she recounted, in her dry Edinburgh voice, tales of people who’d taken poisoned fungus by mistake. Putting off the return to school as long as possible they would build a camp fire at dusk and fry up the edible fungi, the field mushrooms and the ink caps.
    Sitting in the restaurant, watching the candle flicker, Anne could remember the smell of woodsmoke, the feel of the battered tin plates, the taste of buttery juice wiped up with crusty bread. She had learnt something from the Biology teacher. She’d learnt that she never wanted to be like Maggie Masterman, depending on adolescent girls and mushrooms for fun. And that she had a passion for plants.
    “Do you work?” Godfrey asked, breaking into the memory. “Or perhaps you have children?”
    As if the two were mutually exclusive.
    “No, no children. And no permanent work. Bits and pieces, you know.”
    When things were tight. When Jeremy’s mysterious deals failed to come off. She learnt, very soon after marriage, that Jeremy was gay in a camp, rather jolly way. Of course he knew when he married her but perhaps thought, like the old Archbishop of Canterbury, that the right girl would cure him. She was sure that no malice or spite was intended in the transaction but there